Coping with global climate change and achieving sustainable development have become shared visions among humanity. The relentless advancement of the global carbon neutrality agenda has made calculating, managing and regulating greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide, a pressing and important task. Nevertheless, existing research lacks a systematic review of the literature pertaining to carbon emission accounting frameworks and carbon management means. Our study commences with a thorough analysis of the research development progress in carbon emission accounting, focusing on methods and scopes. Meanwhile, we track the evolutionary trends encompassing multidimensional research subjects within this field. Building on this foundation, our study homes in two crucial carbon management subjects: carbon emission reduction system design within economic perspectives, and strategic planning and implementation of advanced carbon emission reduction technologies. It unveils the prevailing themes, critical bottlenecks, and significant challenges of existing research into national-level carbon management. Finally, drawing on the review concerning the research status of global carbon emission accounting and management, our study highlights several key research directions that warrant exploration in the future, aiming to establish a comprehensive policy framework, theoretical foundation, and practical tools for expediting the attainment of a zero-carbon objective at the national level.

The goal of carbon neutrality opens the way for the deep decarbonization of the energy system. However, the exploration and development of domestic oil and gas resources continue to increase, so the development of oil and gas resources will become one of the key directions for the decarbonization of the energy system. The huge potential of CO₂-EOR to enhance oil and gas recovery and realize CO₂ geological storage has attracted much attention. The CO₂-EOR projects have been carried out in China's Songliao, Bohai Bay, Ordos, and Jungeer Basins, etc. In this study, eight blocks of CO₂-EOR in the Daqing, Changqing, Xinjiang, Jilin, Shengli, Zhongyuan and Jiangsu Oilfields and Yanchang Petroleum were selected. Based on the carbon emission analysis framework from the bottom-up engineering perspective, modeling stages including exploration, drilling and completion, extraction, treatment and transportation were included to analyze the trend of production carbon emissions from 2000 to 2021 in the oilfields, further to analyze the change of carbon intensity of CO₂ flooding completely replacing water flooding under two technical scenarios: continuous CO₂ injection and alternating water and gas injection. The results show that: (1) Due to the increase of energy demand caused by resource exhaustion, the carbon intensity of production in most oil fields showed a slow upward trend after 2000, and the total upstream carbon emission increased with increments of oil production from 2000 to 2014. In 2021, the total upstream carbon emission in 8 oil fields was 3,088,500 tonnes CO₂eq. (2) Regardless of the scenario of either continuous CO₂ injection or alternate water and gas injection, when the proportion of CO₂ injection and sequestration is greater than 30%, the carbon intensity of production gradually changes from positive to negative, and it becomes an oilfield with net negative CO₂ emission in the production process. As an important part of carbon capture, usage and storage (CCUS) technology, CO₂-EOR technology will play a crucial role in the future decarbonization of oil and gas energy systems. The scale of trial, production and promotion of CO₂-EOR projects should be further expanded in the future.

More than 120 countries and regions have set the goal of carbon peak and carbon neutrality target (hereinafter referred to as “dual-carbon” targets) as the global response to climate change moves forward. As the global energy transformation process accelerates, oil and gas enterprises mainly based on traditional oil and gas business are facing multiple environmental regulation and carbon emission reduction pressure, and low-carbon transformation strategy has attracted widespread attention.The proposal of the “dual carbon” target makes China’s oil and gas enterprises not only strive to achieve the target through carbon emission reduction, but also take into account their own performance. As a part of the operation and production process of oil and gas enterprises, comprehensive risk management undertakes the important task of escorting the rapid development of oil and gas enterprises, but its impact on the performance of oil and gas enterprises is often ignored. At the same time, the existing comprehensive risk management researches are mainly focused on finance and insurance, while the oil and gas total risk management studies have not received enough attention. In addition, economic, technological and social developments have brought with them many new risks, and traditional risk management in oil and gas companies is increasingly showing its limitations and failing to meet the needs of existing risk management. In this paper, taking 23 state-owned oil and gas enterprises as the research object, the enterprise comprehensive risk management (ERM) evaluation system for the oil and gas industry is constructed, and then the DEA-Malmquist index method is used to measure the performance of the oil and gas industry. On this basis, the fixed-effect and threshold-effect regression model are used to investigate the influence of ERM on oil and gas firm operational performance. We find that the ERM plays a major role on improving the performance of oil and gas companies, although the ERM situation varies greatly among companies. Specifically, the implementation of total risk management of China National Petroleum Corporation, Sinopec Shanghai Petrochemical Company Limited, China Oilfield Services Limited, China Petrochemical Corporation and Sinochem International Corporation is at a high level in the industry, while Daqing Huake Company Limited, Yueyang Xingchang Petrochemical Co., Ltd and Shaanxi Construction Engineering Group Corporation Limited are at a low level in the industry. Further, the ERM mainly promotes the performance improvement of oil and gas enterprises by improving the technological progress, while it inhibits enterprise performance growth by preventing the improvement of comprehensive technical efficiency. The fundamental explanation is the “lag effect” of the ERM on scale efficiency. In the future, oil and gas enterprises need to further implement ERM according to their own conditions, and establish an ERM system consistent with their own management system.

Under the strategic goals of carbon peak and neutrality, controlling the total amount and intensity of energy consumption is crucial, and mapping the embodied energy flows could be helpful to realize the differentiated management of regional energy consumption dual control and facilitate high-quality coordinated regional development. In the meantime, China has proposed to accelerate the establishment of a “dual circulation” development pattern in which the domestic economic cycle plays a leading role while the international economic cycle remains its extension and supplement. This study accounts for the energy footprints (oil, gas, and coal) of Chinese provinces by nesting the Chinese inter-provincial multi-regional input-output model and the global multi-regional input-output models, keeping in mind both internal and international imperatives, and then analyzes the flow direction, distribution and structural characteristics of trade embodied energy between countries and regions. The results show that: (ⅰ) the consumption of embodied energy is dominated by coal in China. There are significant differences in fossil energy consumption among provinces, Shandong, Guangdong, Henan, Jiangsu and Zhejiang's embodied energy consumption ranked in the top five in China. The northwest region's embodied energy consumption accounts for only 5.12% of the country's total consumption. The national per capita consumption of embodied energy is higher than the world average. Provincial per capita embodied energy consumption is significantly correlated with per capita GDP. (ⅱ) The international trade embodied energy flows in inland regions are dominated by coal, while that in the coastal regions such as Guangdong, Shanghai, and Zhejiang by oil and gas. The US, EU, Japan, Korea, and Russia are the main embodied energy trading partners. (ⅲ) There is a spatial mismatch between energy supply and demand on the consumption side, mainly flowing from the middle reaches of the Yellow River and the northern coastal areas to the eastern and southern coastal areas. Hebei, Shanxi, Inner Mongolia and Jiangsu are the main inter-provincial sources of embodied energy exports, while Zhejiang, Guangdong, Henan and Chongqing are the main embodied energy import destinations. (ⅳ) Compared with international trade, the impact of inter-provincial trade on the dual control of energy consumption in provinces is large and heterogeneous. Specifically, the embodied energy trade leads to a significant increase in total energy consumption and intensity in Shanxi, Ningxia and Inner Mongolia, while a significant decrease in Beijing, Chongqing and Jilin. However, domestic and international trade has less impact on dual control of energy consumption in Gansu, Guizhou, Qinghai, Henan, and Shaanxi.