title: Village energy survey reveals missing rural raw coal in northern China: Significance in science and policy.
abstract: Burning coal for winter heating has been considered a major contributor to northern China's winter haze, with the district heating boilers holding the balance. However a decade of intensive efforts on district heating boilers brought few improvements to northern China's winter air quality, arousing a speculation that the household heating stoves mainly in rural area rather than the district heating boilers mainly in urban area dominate coal emissions in winter. This implies an extreme underestimation of rural household coal consumption by the China Energy Statistical Yearbooks (CESYs), although direct evidence supporting this speculation is lacking. A village energy survey campaign was launched to gather the firsthand information on household coal consumption in the rural areas of two cities, Baoding (in Hebei province) and Beijing (the capital of China). The survey data show that the rural raw coal consumption in Baoding (5.04 × 103kt) was approximately 6.5 times the value listed in the official CESY 2013 and exceeded the rural total of whole Hebei Province (4668 kt), revealing a huge amount of raw coal missing from the current statistical system. More importantly, rural emissions of particulate matter (PM) and SO2from raw coal, which had never been included in widely distributing environmental statistical reports, were found higher than those from industrial and urban household sectors in the two cities in 2013, which highlights the importance of rural coal burning in creating northern China's heavy haze and helps to explain why a number of modeling predictions on ambient pollutant concentrations based on normal emission inventories were more bias-prone in winter season than in other seasons. We therefore recommend placing greater emphasis on the "missing" rural raw coal to help China in its long-term ambition to achieve clean air in the context of rapid economic development.
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Environmental Criteria and Risk Assessment, Chinese Research Academy of Environmental Sciences, Beijing 100012, China. Electronic address: zhigr@craes.org.cn.
authors.forename: Guorui
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Zhi
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Environmental Criteria and Risk Assessment, Chinese Research Academy of Environmental Sciences, Beijing 100012, China; College of Chemical Engineering, China University of Petroleum, Beijing 102249, China.
authors.forename: Yayun
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Environmental Criteria and Risk Assessment, Chinese Research Academy of Environmental Sciences, Beijing 100012, China; Yantai Institute of Coastal Research, CAS, Yantai, Shandong Province 264003, China.
authors.forename: Jianzhong
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Sun
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Environmental Criteria and Risk Assessment, Chinese Research Academy of Environmental Sciences, Beijing 100012, China.
authors.forename: Miaomiao
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Cheng
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Environmental Criteria and Risk Assessment, Chinese Research Academy of Environmental Sciences, Beijing 100012, China.
authors.forename: Hongyan
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Dang
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Environmental Criteria and Risk Assessment, Chinese Research Academy of Environmental Sciences, Beijing 100012, China.
authors.forename: Shijie
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Liu
authors.affiliation: Scientific Research Academy of Guangxi Environmental Protection, Nanning, Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, 530022, China.
authors.forename: Junchao
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Yang
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Environmental Criteria and Risk Assessment, Chinese Research Academy of Environmental Sciences, Beijing 100012, China; College of Chemical Engineering, China University of Petroleum, Beijing 102249, China.
authors.forename: Yuzhe
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Environmental Criteria and Risk Assessment, Chinese Research Academy of Environmental Sciences, Beijing 100012, China.
authors.forename: Zhigang
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Xue
authors.affiliation: College of Chemical Engineering, China University of Petroleum, Beijing 102249, China.
authors.forename: Shuyuan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Li
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Environmental Criteria and Risk Assessment, Chinese Research Academy of Environmental Sciences, Beijing 100012, China.
authors.forename: Fan
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Meng
mesh_terms: D000397:Air Pollution / Q000032:analysis* / Q000517:prevention & control; D016902:Air Pollution, Indoor / Q000032:analysis / Q000517:prevention & control; D002681:China / Q000453:epidemiology; D002947:Cities / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D003031:Coal / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D003296:Cooking / Q000295:instrumentation; D004777:Environment; D004784:Environmental Monitoring; D006361:Heating; D006798:Housing; D006801:Humans; D052638:Particulate Matter / Q000032:analysis*; D011640:Public Policy; D012424:Rural Population; D012621:Seasons; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires
chemical_list: D003031:Coal; D052638:Particulate Matter
keywords: Air pollution; China; Residential coal; Rural energy survey; Solid fuel