India GHG Emissions Breakup by End Use
So what are the end use application segments that are responsible for the largest portions of the emissions?
If you look at just energy use, there are just three main types: As power, for heating, and for transport.
But there are also emissions from non-energy end uses – the most prominent being agriculture & livestock which emit significant amounts of non CO2 (CH4 and N2O emissions).
So how these end use applications stack up in terms of total CO2 emissions equivalent for 2023, which is 3.4 billion tons?
This is how they do – as % of total CO2eq emissions by weight.
- Power (including electricity used for heating): 42%
- Agri & livestock: 22%
- “Thermal source” based heating: 18%
- Transport: 12%
- Land use change, waste emissions, fugitive emissions from fossil fuel production: 6%
A note about each of the above:
Power: This of course refers to all the power consumed – across residential, industrial and commercial sectors, including power required for heating (induction heating, for instance). Such power could be generated from fossil fuel based power plants (coal, gas, oil) that are either IPPs (independent power plants) or captive projects.
Agri & livestock – This is a much less understood end use sector. There are a variety of emissions from this sector – methane emissions alone could be owing to cattle burbs (owing to enteric fermentation, methane emissions from crops under water (as it happens at rice fields) or methane emissions from livestock waste. There are also N2O emissions – mainly from fertilizer run-off. Finally, there are some energy emissions too, for both agri & livestock, these are much smaller than the above two, and these get accounted for under Power & Heating.
“Thermal” source based heating – this is the estimate I found really hard to arrive at. I won’t bore you with details, but suffice to say that, while I’m unlikely to be seriously in error, these numbers could change a bit as I collect more inputs. But not a lot, really.
Transport: This is easy. Petrol, diesel & gas used for transport. Not electric vehicles of course, even if you consider the emissions from the electricity that powers the batteries, because they get accounted for under Power!
Where did I get the above from? There is no real place where all these are available and served on a platter. I had to use multiple sources, some of which were official (and as authentic as it can get), but others were estimates based on benchmarks I collected and used my own judgement based on my experience in this field!
Hope this is useful.
If you have queries on this, please send a note to narsi@eai.in and I will try my best to help! – Narsi, EAI
