Library & Data

This ChinaFAQs Issue Brief profiles a selection of recent U.S.-China cooperative projects in clean energy, offering a flavor of the breadth and depth of Sino-American cooperation, as well as potential benefits and challenges.

Good morning and thank you for the opportunity to contribute to the deliberations of this Commission. My name is Sarah Forbes, and I am a Senior Associate for the Climate and Energy Program at the World Resources Institute. I am also manager of the World Resources Institute’s Shale Gas Initiative. The World Resources Institute is a non-profit, non-partisan environmental think tank that goes beyond research to provide practical solutions to the world’s most urgent environmental and development challenges. We work in partnership with scientists, businesses, governments, and non-governmental organizations in more than seventy countries to provide information, tools, and analysis to provide for human well-being.

The Guidelines for Carbon Dioxide Capture, Utilization, and Storage (CCUS) in China, prepared under a cooperative project of the Tsinghua BP Center and the World Resources Institute, is released in Beijing today.

The Guidelines are the first detailed examination of CCUS regulations in China. It provides a complete set of recommendations for how to regulate CCUS in its technical, environmental and social dimensions.

Key Points

• A new study by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory finds that, with a continuation of current policies, China’s energy consumption will reach a plateau before 2040 (95% of plateau level by 2030 or 2035) and its CO2 emissions will peak around 2030.
• Many sectors will “saturate” as China reaches its maximum amounts of residential and commercial floor area, roadways, railways, appliances per household, and associated energy-intensive structural materials (iron and steel; cement) in the time period between 2030 and 2035. The result will be the slowing of energy demand growth as it becomes driven by replacement needs instead of new demand in the market.
• The report suggests that, by continuing to strengthen the implementation of its energy efficiency policies and programs, to provide incentives to switch to less energy-intensive industries and less carbon-intensive energy supply technologies, and to innovate to improve and expand financial incentive mechanisms, China will be able to meet its goal of reducing CO2 emissions intensity by 40% to 45% below 2005 levels by 2020 as announced in the Copenhagen Accords.