Coastal Hotspots for the Mitigation of Carbon Dioxide Emission from the Power, Steelmaking, and Cement Industries

This study makes four contributions to the current research on global decarbonization. First, a detailed analysis of CO₂ emission from four heavy industries (coal-fired power plants (CFPPs), oil-and-gas-fired power plants (OGFPPs), steelmaking, and cement) reveals that globally there are 41 coastal hotspots of anthropogenic CO₂ emission. In 2024, they emitted 6.31 Gt of CO₂, representing 16.7% of the global CO₂ emission. About 37% of the emission came from steelmaking, 31% from OGFPPs, 24% of CFPPs, and 9% from cement factories. Second, 10 out of the top 14 coastal hotspots reside in Asia due to increasing population and gross domestic product (GDP) per capita. They are Tokyo-to-Kitakyushu Inner Bays, Bohai Bay, Yangtze River Mouth, east coast of India, west coast of India, Pearl River Mouth, Incheon Bay, Taiwan Strait, Java Sea, and northern coast of Vietnam. Third, the results of CO₂ source-sink mapping show that it is possible to decarbonize these Asian coastal hotspots by storing captured CO₂ in nearshore saline aquifers as well as oil and gas reservoirs. Fourth, decarbonization of these coastal hotspots should be done by developing carbon capture and storage (CCS) corridors, where clusters of CO₂ sources are connected to a common nearshore sink via a shared network of CO₂ pipelines.