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China’s commitment to the UNFCCC to peak its emissions by 2030, or sooner, signaled a long anticipated shift in China’s model of development with far reaching consequences. Cities in China, and particularly the residential sector in cities, will be charged with making significant reductions in emissions growth even as rates of urbanization continue to climb. Focusing on Beijing and Shanghai, this paper carries out a measures-based economic analysis of low carbon investment opportunities in the residential sector. Results find significant opportunity: between 2015 and 2030, BAU levels of CO 2 emissions could be reduced by 10.2% in Beijing and 6.8% in Shanghai with the adoption of economically attractive low carbon measures. While these headline results underline the case for low carbon investment in the residential sectors of these megacities in China, a closer analysis provides insights for understanding the economics of decarbonisation in cities more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change present a range of equity issues for human being, but operating the equity principle within emission allocation scheme to various parties has raised multiple challenges. Although more than 40 schemes have been suggested in the literatures, there is little consistency in the way that baselines, scope, coverage and other key parameters have been compared or discussed. In this paper, we reviewed 41 schemes used in the literature so far and compared the cumulative allowances of main countries under various schemes in a consistent framework. Two cases are considered, i.e. only energy and industry related CO 2 and all Kyoto GHGs. Besides the allowances, carbon Gini coefficient in the global perspective and the reduction tradeoffs between country groups are further quantitatively discussed. It is demonstrated that the full ranges of countries’ allowances are quite large resulting from different equity considerations and implement methods behind different effort-sharing schemes. However, absolute mitigations are always required in developed countries in order to realize the 2 °C target, regardless of schemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• A new, pseudo-transient re-formulation for rate-based column models. • Seamless integration with a library of pseudo-transient unit operation models. • Application to simulation and optimization of complex carbon capture processes. • Validation of next-generation flowsheet against a rigorous thermodynamic model. • Results reveal economic effect of solvent stability and flue gas composition. Amine scrubbing processes remain an important technology for mitigating the contribution of carbon emissions to global warming and climate change. Like other chemical processes, they can benefit from computer-aided optimization at the design stage, but systematic optimization procedures are rarely employed due to the challenges of simulating the requisite rate-based mass transfer and reaction models. This paper presents a novel approach for the simulation and optimization of rate-based columns, with specific application to the absorber and stripper columns found in (amine-) solvent-based carbon capture processes. The approach is based on pseudo-transient continuation, and the resulting column models are easily incorporated into large-scale process flowsheets with other previously developed pseudo-transient models. We demonstrate that the proposed approach allows for gradient-based optimization of next-generation amine scrubbing processes by considering a complex carbon capture process under three different operating conditions. The results provide general insight into the design of amine scrubbing processes, and shadow prices at the optimal point(s) suggest potential avenues for improving the process economics. The effects of carbon dioxide removal percentage and flue gas composition on process economics are briefly analyzed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]