Greenhouse Gas Emissions per City, industrial sources, fuel suppliers, and electricity importers, California, 2014

The 2014 Summary Spreadsheet of GHG emissions was downloaded from:  http://www.arb.ca.gov/cc/reporting/ghg-rep/reported-data/ghg-reports.htm

Description of the spreadsheet from the website: 

"Under California’s Regulation for the Mandatory Reporting of Greenhouse Gas Emissions (MRR), industrial sources, fuel suppliers, and electricity importers must report their annual GHG emissions to the California Air Resources Board (ARB). For reporters subject to the California Cap-and-Trade Program, submitted data are verified by an ARB-accredited independent third-party verifier.

The summary spreadsheet of 2014 GHG emissions data reported under MRR for individual reporting facilities, electric power entities, and fuel suppliers."

Emissions Units Overview (from spreadsheet):

Emissions shown are typically provided in units of metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalents, shown as metric tons CO2e. On a per molecule basis, different greenhouse gases (GHGs) have different intensities in their contribution to global warming. To normalize these differences, individual gases are multiplied by a Global Warming Potential (GWP) factor. The CO2e totals shown, which include emissions from carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), and nitrous oxide (N2O), are multiplied by their respective GWPs of 1, 21, and 310 prior to being added to the totals. The GWPs used are from Title 40, Part 98 of the Code of Federal Regulations, Subpart A, Table A-1, as published in the Federal Register on October 30, 2009 (http://www.arb.ca.gov/cc/reporting/ghg-rep/regulation/subpart_a_rule_part98.pdf)"

Definition of Total CO2e Field (from spreadsheet)

This column, calculated by ARB based on the reported data, shows: a) the sum of reported CO2e from stationary combustion of fossil fuels and biomass-derived fuels, process and vented emissions, geothermal emissions, emissions associated with imported electricity, and emissions associated with final combustion of fuel reported by fuel suppliers, or b) total emissions assigned by ARB staff, when required by the reporting regulation (see AEL, below), which includes all elements listed in "a)" as applicable.  In some instances, the total emissions may be zero.  This indicates the reporting entity is an electricity retail provider, who only needs to report (and not verify) MWh, or the reporting entity or facility had no reportable emissions for the year.

Conservation Biology Institute methods to create spatial dataset from spreadsheet data:

Two columns from this spreadsheet were selected and pasted into a new spreadsheet:  "Total Emissions (Metric Tons CO2e)" and "City".  A pivot table was created in Microsoft Excel to total all CO2e per city.  The two columns in the pivot table were cut and pasted into a new spreadsheet.

A shapfile of city boundaries was downloaded from Caltrans (http://www.dot.ca.gov/hq/tsip/gis/datalibrary/Metadata/cities.html).  There were multiple polygons per city, so this layer was dissolved by city name.

The spreadsheet containing metric tons of CO2e per city was joined to the dissolved city dataset by city name.  This was exported to a new dataset.  The datset was styled by metric tons CO2e.  Cities that had no data were assigned a value of 0; therefore values of "0" were exclcluded from the styling as null.