At 9:15 am on July 16, the national carbon market was officially launched for online trading. The launch ceremony of the national carbon market was held simultaneously in Beijing, Shanghai and Wuhan. The national carbon market adopts the "two-city model", setting up the trading center in Shanghai and setting up the carbon allowance registration center in Wuhan
At 9:30 in the morning, the national carbon emission rights trading was officially launched on the Shanghai Environment and Energy Exchange, and the opening price of the national carbon trading was 48 yuan/ton. At 9:30, the first national carbon transaction has been successfully matched, with a price of 52.78 yuan per ton, a total of 160,000 tons of transactions and a transaction volume of 7.9 million yuan.
Ten companies including Shenergy Group, China Resources Power, China Huadian Group, China Petroleum and Chemical Corporation, National Energy Group, State Power Investment Group, China Huaneng Group, China National Petroleum Corporation, China Datang Group, and Zhejiang Energy Group have become national carbon trading companies. The first batch of transaction enterprises in the market.

The power generation industry became the first industry to be included in the national carbon market, with more than 2,000 key emission units included. According to calculations by the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, the carbon emissions of companies covered by the first batch of carbon markets exceed 4 billion tons of carbon dioxide, which means that my country's carbon market will become the largest market covering greenhouse gas emissions in the world, and will become an important step in global climate action.

Huang Runqiu, Minister of the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, stated that the national carbon market is a major institutional innovation that uses market mechanisms to control and reduce company emissions and promote green development. In the first industrial cycle of the national carbon market, there were 2,162 key open units in my country's power generation industry, covering approximately 4.5 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions.

It is understood that the construction of my country's carbon market started from local pilot projects, and local pilot projects of carbon emission trading have been carried out in seven provinces (cities) of Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, Chongqing, Hubei, Guangdong, and Shenzhen. By June 2021, the pilot provinces and cities' carbon market has accumulated a total quota transaction volume of 480 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent, with a transaction volume of approximately 11.4 billion yuan.