The Vulcan Version 3.0 High-Resolution Fossil Fuel CO₂ Emissions for the United States

Estimates of high-resolution greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions have become a critical component of climate change research and an aid to decision makers considering GHG mitigation opportunities. The “Vulcan Project” is an effort to estimate bottom-up carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel combustion and cement production (FFCO₂) for the U.S. landscape at space and time scales that satisfy both scientific and policy needs. Here, we report on the Vulcan version 3.0 which quantifies emissions at a resolution of 1 km²/hr for the 2010–2015 time period. We estimate 2011 FFCO₂ emissions of 1,589.9 TgC with a 95% confidence interval of 1,367/1,853 TgC (−14.0%/+16.6%), implying a one-sigma uncertainty of ~ ±8%. Per capita emissions are larger in states dominated by electricity production and industrial activity and smaller where onroad and building emissions dominate. The U.S. FFCO₂ emissions center of mass (CoM) is located in the state of Missouri with mean seasonality that moves on a near-elliptical NE/SW path. Comparison to ODIAC, a global gridded FFCO₂ emissions estimate, shows large total emissions differences (100.4 TgC for year 2011), a spatial correlation of 0.68 (R²), and a mean absolute relative difference at the 1 km² scale of 104.3%. The Vulcan data product offers a high-resolution estimate of FFCO₂ emissions in every U.S. city, obviating costly development of self-reported urban inventories. The Vulcan v3.0 annual gridded emissions data product can be downloaded from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory Distributed Active Archive Center (Gurney, Liang, et al., 2019, https://doi.org/10.3334/ORNLDAAC/1741).