posted on 2019-11-14, 14:03authored byQirui Zhong, Huizhong Shen, Xiao Yun, Yilin Chen, Yu’ang Ren, Haoran Xu, Guofeng Shen, Jianmin Ma, Shu Tao
Fossil fuel combustion is the dominant source of global
sulfur
dioxide (SO2) emissions. With rapid globalization, the
expansion of international fuel trade may have profound impacts on
SO2 emissions due to the mixing and the spatial reallocation
of fuels with varied quality (e.g., sulfur contents), which has not
been clearly addressed. Here, by introducing international fuel trade
and three additional counterfactual scenarios, we first assessed the
impacts of fuel trade on global SO2 emissions for the period
1980–2030. It was estimated that in 2014 international fuel
trade caused an increase in global SO2 emissions from hard
coal and oil consumption by 4% and 71%, respectively, with stronger
influences found for individual countries. By changing the fuel trade
choice, global SO2 emissions attributable to fuel trade
would be reduced by 78%. We also showed that such effects of fuel
trade on SO2 emissions continuously increased from 1980
to 2014 and will keep increasing in the foreseeable future due to
more frequent fuel trading under globalization.