China’s provincial process CO₂ emissions from cement production during 1993–2019

Carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions from China’s cement production process have increased rapidly in recent decades, comprising the second-largest source of CO₂ emissions in the country, next only to fossil fuel combustion. However, there used to lack high-quality data to estimate provincial process-related CO₂ emissions from the cement industry of China. It has been recognised that many previous publications have adopted cement-based accounting methods or national average emission factors to estimate them. This study assembles fundamental provincial clinker production data and provincial clinker emission factors from multiple official statistics sources, following the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) methodology (A clinker-based estimation methodology), to develop a high-quality panel dataset of China’s provincial process-related cement emissions during 1993–2019. In 2019, the gross cement process emissions of China amounted to 818.2 Mt CO₂, and the cumulative emissions between 1993–2019 were estimated to be approximately 12.5 Gt CO₂. There are significant differences in provincial process-related CO₂ emissions. The dataset is crucial to provincial cement process emission characterisation and emissions reduction policy-making in China.