Global Infrastructure Emission Database (GID) released

Global economic development is highly dependent on fossil fuels currently. The infrastructure worldwide emits a large amount of greenhouse gases (GHGs) and air pollutants when generating and consuming fossil fuels, which has detrimental impact on climate change, air quality and human health. Considering their several-decade lifetime, the newly built highly CO2-emitting infrastructure in the developing countries with rapid economic growth will continuously produce a great quantity of carbon emissions (i.e. committed carbon emissions), seriously threatening the transformation towards low-carbon energy structure and the realization of carbon neutral. Energy infrastructure is the basic unit of GHGs and air pollutant emissions, and is also the foothold to formulate the strategies targeting climate change and air pollution control. However, for a long time, the basic infrastructure data of many countries and regions is opaque and unpublished, and unified data basis and technical methods are also lacking. Thus, currently most research targeting global emissions of key sectors and their climate and environmental impact can only be conducted at a relatively macroscopic scale, and struggle to provide enough support for scientific research and policy making.

With the support from Energy Foundation, Ministry of Science and Technology of the People’s Republic of China, China’s National Key R&D Programmes and Ministry of Ecology and Environment of the People’s Republic of China, the Global Energy Infrastructure Emissions Database (GID) was developed by Tsinghua University in corporation with many organizations and teams at home and abroad from 2018, aiming to establish a global energy infrastructure database including unit-/facility-level basic information and emissions in order to provide solid data support for scientific research and policy making. The GID team conducts data mining on multiple global and regional energy infrastructure databases, sorts out basic information of more than 100,000 energy-generating and consuming facilities in service worldwide, and uses big data methods to develop a unified emission quantification model, successfully obtaining unit-/facility-level CO2 and air pollutant emissions on the basis of efforts above.

The GID team is committed to provide the scientific community with high-resolution emission data products of global energy-generating and consuming infrastructure. Currently, GID website is online for trial operation, and GID team simultaneously releases plant-level basic information and CO2 emission data of power, iron and steel and cement sectors in 2019 as well as aggregated information on country-, region- and global level capacity, operating years and emissions. Welcome everyone to follow, download and use the data.

The aim is to make GID an open-access research platform that will continuously make contributions to research on global and regional climate change and low-carbon development.

Teams and individuals who are interested in the GID database are invited to join the collaborative development and provide the scientific community with more detailed, more accurate and user-friendly energy infrastructure emission data products together.

If you are interested in building GID together, please contact GID team (gid@tsinghua.edu.cn).