CO2 emissions from China’s lime industry

China is now the world’s leading energy consumer and CO2 emitter; therefore, precise quantification of the CO2 emissions that occur in China is of serious concern. Although most studies focus on CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion and cement production, the emissions from lime production is not well researched. Lime production is the second largest source of carbon emissions from industrial processes after cement production. This is the first study to present an analysis of CO2 emissions from China’s lime production from 2001 to 2012, and we have estimated the process emissions (scope 1 direct emissions caused by the process), fossil fuel combustion emissions (scope 1 direct emissions caused by fossil fuel combustion), and scope 2 indirect emissions (CO2 emissions caused by electricity consumption) from China’s lime industry. The estimations show that the process emissions increased rapidly from 88.79million tonnes to 141.72million tonnes from 2001 to 2012. In 2012, the scope 1 emissions from fossil fuel combustion were 56.55million tonnes, whereas the scope 2 indirect emissions were 4.42million tonnes. Additionally, we analysed the uncertainty of our estimations, and our analysis shows that the relative uncertainty of the emission factors and activities data falls between 2.83% and 3.34%.