Spatially differentiated effects of socioeconomic factors on China's NOx generation from energy consumption: implications for mitigation policy

Nitrogen oxides (NOx) has become the priority of China's air pollution control, but the regional socio-economic factors responsible for NOx generation are embedded with spatial disparities, which leads to different effects of air quality policy at the local level. This study applied a geographically weighted regression (GWR) model to investigate the drivers of NOx generation from energy consumption (NGEC) in China's 30 provinces, to explore nonstationary spatial effects of NGEC. The results showed that population size has always been the dominant factor in spatial NGEC across all regions of China, although there is a minor north-south difference. However, the effect of per capita GDP and energy intensity leads to a significant north-south difference when they are influencing NGEC, which shows a minor west-east difference from thermal power generation (TE). We also found that in Northern and Northeast China, the transition towards cleaner energy structure based on natural gas has started correlating significantly with NOx generation through a weakly negative effect in 2015. Our findings show alternative strategies on NOx reduction, which include the spatially differentiated effect of regional socioeconomic factors on energy consumption.