This document summarizes the speaker's experience working with national pollution transfer and release registers (PRTRs) from four countries - France, Netherlands, Norway, and UK. It provides details on the data available in each PRTR, including reporting thresholds, timespan of data, number of installations covered, and limitations. It discusses challenges in identifying installations covered by the EU Emissions Trading System and matching data across registers. Potential ways to address these challenges through combining plant data with firm-level data are also outlined.

1. EXPERIENCE WITH NATIONAL
POLLUTION TRANSFER AND
RELEASE REGISTERS
Daniel Nachtigall
OECD microdata workshop
10 July 2018

2. • What is the causal impact of the EU ETS on
carbon emissions (and economic
performance)?
• Matched diff-in-diff design
• Causal impact of the EU ETS: 10%
Research question and methodology
2

3. • Installation-level data
– Name, address, coordinates
– GHG and other emissions to air, land and water
– Economic sector and main activity (Annex I)
• Advantage relative to E-PRTR
– More installations (France: 15.000 vs. 3.500)
– Larger timespan (Netherlands: 1990 )
– More pollutants (Netherlands: >300 vs. 91)
– Lower reporting threshold for certain pollutants
3
National PRTRs

4. • (Almost) no identifier for mother company
– Use Orbis for 2nd part of research question
• High reporting threshold for carbon
emissions (100kt)
• Only very few control installations
• E-PRTR, Germany, Spain…
• Data availability after 2005
• Sweden, Ireland, Italy, Germany…
4
Limitations

5. • France, Netherlands, Norway, UK
Four PRTRs suited
Country France Netherlands Norway UK Total
Coverage since 2003 since 1990 since 1997 since 1998 -
Reporting threshold CO2 10 kt <1 kt <1 kt 10 kt -
# installations 14797 1849 1447 5500 23593
- with CO2 emissions 1648 1593 499 1024 4764
- covered by EU ETS 912 294 113 509 1828
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6. Challenge: Identify treated installation
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• No data on capacity
• No common installation identifier for
PRTR and EUTL
– France: okay
– Netherlands: String matching algorithm based
on name, address, postcode…
– Norway: Information on website
– United Kingdom: Based on postcode

7. Other challenges
• No installation identifier at all (UK)
• Varying definitions of sectors over time
– NACE (old and new), broad sector definition
• Missing values on GHG emissions
– Not reported, below reporting threshold or
exit?
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8. What we could do
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• Combining plant with firm-level data
– France: SIREN (and SIRET)
– Norway: Organisation number
• Close to the work of
– Wagner et al. (2014) and Marin and Vona
(2017) for France
– Klemetsen et al. (2016) for Norway

9. Thanks for your attention:
Daniel.Nachtigall@oecd.org