Lofty emissions goal
▶ State-owned companies face challenges in achieving China’s carbon neutrality goal
Various efforts
China’s state-owned companies have been applying their advantages in various ways to realize the goal of carbon reduction.
China National Offshore Oil Corporation (CNOOC), based on its technical advantages of offshore drilling platform construction, launched its first offshore wind power project in East China’s Jiangsu Province in April 2019.
In September 2020, the project was successfully connected to the grid for power generation, and was expected to provide approximately 860 million kwh of on-grid power annually. Compared with conventional coal-fired thermal power units with the same power generation capacity, it can save 279,000 tons of standard coal and reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 571,000 tons every year.
CNOOC is also discussing plans to lead in natural gas, which is produced during the process of offshore oil extraction and sent to the land for urban gas supply to replace power from coal combustion, an environmental observer told the Global Times.
PetroChina launched its first carbon-neutral forest project in Daqing, Northeast China’s Heilongjiang Province last November, in order to promote its green and low-carbon transformation, according to the official website of Daqing Municipal People’s Government.
Carbon neutral forests are an ecological compensation method to neutralize carbon emissions through afforestation.
The forest covers an area of 510 mu (34 hectares) and plans exist to plant 21,260 trees in two phases in accordance with the construction principle of multiple tree species, stratification and considering biodiversity. It is expected to neutralize the estimated 3,344 tons of carbon emissions in 2020 and 2021.
Systemic advantages
“State-owned enterprises are often the key group constrained by policy, and more sensitive to policy, which may help them implement changes more quickly,” Ma said.
Moreover, companies received support from the nation.
For example, large-scale state-owned enterprises are engaged in the policy-making process of China’s Banking and Insurance Regulatory Commission about climate investment and financing, and they are more inclined to green environmental protection projects in terms of investment and loans.
China’s first compliance cycle of the national carbon market for the power generation industry officially started on January 1, a start for the country to open its carbon market, being an efficient and bargain way to tackle the emissions issue.
“This quota plan, for the first time at the national level, consolidates the responsibilities of controlling greenhouse gas emissions by companies,” Li Gao, head of the climate change department at the MEE, told media on January 5.
For Sinopec Jinan Company, realizing green production has become one of its major mission nowadays.
Founded in 1971 and widely known as the Jinan Refinery by locals, the company was previously located in the suburban industrial region of the capital of East China’s Shandong Province. However, since the beginning of this century, the expansion of Jinan has amalgamated the company into the city’s urban area.
It means greater pressure for heavy polluters being surrounded by the city.
Jinan Iron & Steel Co Ltd, another heavy polluter that was previously located next to Jinan Refinery, launched its relocation to Rizhao, a coastal city in Shandong in 2017. Advocacy for closing or relocating Jinan Refinery has ceased to remain silent over the past two decades.
Urban residents’ concerns have not come from nowhere. “When I was a child in the 1990s, whenever it rained, you could see oil floating in the rainwater on the ground,” Han Xinying, a worker at Jinan Refinery, told the Global Times. The region has also suffered from severe air pollution.
But the situation is changing.
In 2018, Sinopec, China’s petro-giant and parent corporation of the Jinan Refinery, published a plan aiming to build a green corporation of “clean, efficient, low-carbon and recycling,” together with related measures.
The Jinan Refinery thus began to take its advantage of being located in a capital city and strives to build a model of a “safe, reliable, clean and environmentally friendly” urban refinery.
The company continues to carry out clean production inspections, promotes oil quality upgrades, and implements the green enterprise action plan. Some of its product bases and equipment sets are from Sinopec, according to a statement from the Jinan Refinery to the Global Times.
“The refinery launched a ‘green water and blue-sky project,’ a few years ago,” Han said. “The emitted water, after clarification, could meet the standard of keeping fish.”
Xia Jixiang, general manager of the Jinan Refinery, told the Global Times that since the 13th Five-Year Plan (201620), the company has invested almost 1 billion yuan in tackling and preventing pollution and cutting emissions. In the next five years, the company will find its approximate position in the city’s development, continue to increase green development investment and build an urban garden-like factory.
Sinopec is not the only petro-corporation in China that eyes green development. For instance, China National Petroleum Corporation has included addressing climate change into its development plan. The company has supplied 181.3 billion cubic meters of natural gas in 2019, accounting for 65 percent of the domestic market. It also helped 1 million households convert their power supply from coal to natural gas that year.