Abstract: Chemical industry is the main industry of global energy consumption and carbon emission, as the complex structure of its products, and so many influencing factors of emission reduction, the research of the carbon emission reduction potential and route become one of the research focuses. A comprehensive carbon dioxide reduction potential model is constructed in this paper for chemical industry. Firstly, combining with a wide variety of chemical industry products, a two stage accounting method based on industry level and product level respectively is established. On this basis, synthetically considered the factors of development scale, structure adjustment and technical progress of the chemical industry, a scenario analysis method is established for carbon dioxide emission reduction potential of chemical industry. Using this method, carbon emission reduction of the chemical industry in Chongqing is introduced as an application example, which is the only municipality in western China, one of the first national low-carbon pilot cities. The empirical results show that, with the development of petrochemical industry, the carbon dioxide emissions in Chongqing chemical industry will maintain rapid growth in future, the inflection point is difficult to achieve by 2020; meanwhile, with the increasing proportion of fine chemical products, and the improving of energy efficiency, the carbon dioxide emissions intensity will decrease significantly in future. Finally, the principles of product structure adjustment and technical progress are proposed to realize carbon emission reduction of chemical industry in China.

Key words: chemical industry, carbon dioxide, accounting model in two stages, carbon emission reduction potential