Carbon dioxide emission factors

Description: Amount of carbon dioxide emissions produced per unit of a specific energy source.
Data source: IPCC – Emission Factor Database (2025) – with minor processing by Our World in Data
Unit: grams of CO₂ per kilowatt-hour
Date range: 2025-2025
Last updated: 2025-11-26
Next expected update: 2026-11-26
Managed by: Pablo Rosado

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Frequently asked questions

How did Our World in Data process this data?

All data and visualizations on Our World in Data rely on data sourced from one or several original data providers. Preparing this original data involves several processing steps. Depending on the data, this can include standardizing country names and world region definitions, converting units, calculating derived indicators such as per capita measures, as well as adding or adapting metadata such as the name or the description given to an indicator.

At the link below you can find a detailed description of the structure of our data pipeline, including links to all the code used to prepare data across Our World in Data.

Read about our data pipeline

Notes on our processing step for this indicator

Data has been converted from kilograms per terajoule (kg/TJ) to grams per kilowatt-hour (g/kWh) using a conversion factor of 0.0036.

Data sources

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – Emission Factor Database

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Emission Factor Database (EFDB) is a library of emission factors and parameters that can be used for estimation of national greenhouse gas emissions/removals. For more details, see the User Manual.

Retrieved on

November 26, 2025

Retrieved from

https://www.ipcc-nggip.iges.or.jp/EFDB/

Citation

This is the citation of the original data obtained from the source, prior to any processing or adaptation by Our World in Data.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Emission Factor Database (EFDB) contains default data from IPCC Guidelines and data from other sources (e.g., peer-reviewed papers) with background information.
The data extracted from the IPCC EFDB comes from the 2006 IPCC Guidelines for National Greenhouse Gas Inventories.

How to cite

How to cite this page

To cite this page overall, including any descriptions, FAQs or explanations of the data authored by Our World in Data, please use the following citation:

“Data Page: Carbon dioxide emission factors”, part of the following publication: Hannah Ritchie, Pablo Rosado, and Max Roser (2023) - “CO₂ and Greenhouse Gas Emissions”. Data adapted from Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Retrieved from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20261014-113329/grapher/carbon-dioxide-emissions-factor.html [online resource] (archived on October 14, 2026).

How to cite this data

If you have limited space (e.g. in data visualizations), you can use this abbreviated in-line citation:

IPCC – Emission Factor Database (2025) – with minor processing by Our World in Data

Full citation

IPCC – Emission Factor Database (2025) – with minor processing by Our World in Data. “Carbon dioxide emission factors” [dataset]. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, “Emission Factor Database” [original data]. Retrieved October 14, 2026 from https://archive.ourworldindata.org/20261014-113329/grapher/carbon-dioxide-emissions-factor.html (archived on October 14, 2026).

All data produced by third-party providers and made available by Our World in Data are subject to the license terms from the original providers. Our work would not be possible without the data providers we rely on, so we ask you to always cite them appropriately. This is crucial to allow data providers to continue doing their work, enhancing, maintaining and updating valuable data.

All data, visualizations, and code produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited.

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