The Impact of Petroleum Product Intensity, Gasoil consumption and GDP on CO2 Emissions in Transportation Sector of Iran

The present study, in addition to investigating the impacts of GDP and gasoil consumption as the biggest consumed petroleum product in Iranian transportation sector, by introducing petroleum product intensity, studied their effects on CO2 emission in this sector.  To evaluate the impact of the variables, we estimated an autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) model between the years 1996 and 2018. The results of our estimations showed that in long run, gasoil consumption, petroleum product intensity, and GDP respectively are the most important factors affecting CO2 emission in the transportation sector of Iran. While in short run, GDP and the amount of gasoil consumption were the most important factors. Considering the findings of our study and to cope with the increasing trend of CO2 emission in Iran transportation sector, improving the quality of Gasoil, moving towards clean fuels, declining the petroleum products intensity through enhancing trucks and heavy vehicles engine technology, and renovations of the fleet are recommended to the Iranian energy and environmental policymakers.