China Daily Global Edition (USA)
Welcome waters
Life-giving resource flowing in remote Gobi Desert city
An oilfield in the Gobi Desert hardly conjures up visions of an ideal living environment, but the city of Karamay has created a pleasant life for its more than 400,000 residents.
Karamay, in Northwest China’s Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, is known for its oil and gas rigs, and its name means “black oil” in the Uygur language. Yet this man-made oasis also has some breathtaking scenery and unexpected pleasures.
The sun rises and sets later than in most of the country. Every evening, residents gather at Karamay Lake to watch a water fountain performance and enjoy the cool breeze that rustles through the trees.
There are some surprising twists that make this remote destination ideal for people seeking something out of the ordinary. They include the city fountain, with its pivoting nozzles that shoot water high into the air in an array of patterns, accompanied by lights and music; the mesmerizing sight of hundreds of pump jacks bringing crude oil to the surface; and the windcarved rock and sand sculptures called yardang.
With the efforts of generations of local people, Karamay has changed from a desert to a modern petroleum and petrochemical base and a civilized, livable modern city.
Karamay didn’t even exist until the 1950s. The land was uninhabited, a barren landscape of desert and brush.
“There was nothing: no water, no houses, no grass,” said Turdi Kasim, who arrived in Karamay in 1975. He was hired as an oil worker in the city soon after leaving the army when he was 21.
“There was only the wind, which blew every day,” he said. “We dug cellars to sleep in, built dry toilets, had to work with rudimentary supplies and drank rationed water trekked in on the backs of camels. I wanted to do something about that, and trees were the first thing to come to my mind.”
When he retired in 2000, Kasim, now 64, started to plant trees in the Gobi Desert. He used his pension to buy saplings and replaced the sand with fresh, fertile soil.
When he started, only 20 percent of trees could survive due to the harsh desert environment and lack of water in Karamay. However, he did not give up. Over 18 years, he has grown more than 2.7 hectares of forest with more than 10,000 trees.
“What you see today is truly amazing, and I’m proud that I helped make it happen,” he said.
Industrial chain
For most people, the closest they actually come to oil and gas is putting gasoline in their cars or paying their winter heating bill. But for residents of Karamay, oil is a dream, a livelihood, and their city’s reason for being.
The first oil reserves were discovered in October 1955. Three years later, the State Council, China’s Cabinet, established the city of Karamay with the goal of developing oil production and related industries.
Today, 90 percent of the city’s GDP is dependent on the oil and petrochemical industries, and as many as a third of its residents have, at one time, been employed by an oil company.
In 1959, the city opened China’s first oilfield with annual production capacity of more than 1 million metric tons, accounting for 40 percent of domestic oil production.
A second oilfield with an annual production capacity of 3 million tons was built in 1977, while the first oilfield in western China with annual production capacity of 10 million tons was opened in the city in 2002.
With proven oil reserves of 2.6 billion tons, the city has drilled more than 370 million tons of oil and 82 billion cubic meters of natural gas, adding up to 198 billion yuan ($28.6 billion) in national and local tax revenues, according to official data.
A typical, resource-based city, Karamay also commands a complete industrial chain, with first-class technological services and skilled workers. The city government is pushing ahead with a strategy based on the information industry to turn it into a world-class oil city.
Greening project
If the city exists because of oil, it has flourished because of water.
Surrounded by desert, the city is subject to hot, dry weather, and it previously suffered from a shortage of water and scant vegetation.
Tan Zhijun, deputy head of the city’s department of housing and urban-rural development, said, “Children here start learning about environmental protection at an early age because we want them to know the hardships early generations endured in planting trees and the importance of protecting the environment.”
In 1965, the city planted its first trees, three rows of elms in the city center irrigated with sewage water.
“The whole city stank, but we couldn’t spare more water for trees as each person only got 3 cu m of water a month,” Tan said.
Everyone knows the importance of trees to the city. A vice-mayor’s approval is required before relocating more than three trees, Tan said, and the city forbids any replanting of trees from May to October.
“It is harder to plant a tree in Karamay than raise a baby,” he said.
Matters took a turn for the better in 2000 with the completion of a water transport project that brings in 400 million cu m of water every year. The water has completely changed the once-arid no man’s land and turned it into a modern oasis.
In 2001, the city started a massive tree planting program and built a windbreak between the city and the Junggar Basin, one of the largest and most petroleum-rich basins in China, and home to the country’s second-largest desert, the Gurbantunggut.
Karamay initiated a new greening project in 2012, with 277,400 people participating in tree planting.
The city invested 12.7 billion yuan from 2012 to 2016 in environmental protection, and more than 4,900 hectares of trees have been planted in the past six years.
By the end of last year, trees and grass covered 43 percent of the city, with the per capita green space reaching 11.6 square meters, up from 2 sq m in 1999.
In 2016, more than 90 percent of days were of first- or second-grade air quality, and living standards have also improved. Per capita living space reached 40 sq m in 2016, up from 28 sq m in 2012.
Karamay’s GDP hit 72.2 billion yuan last year, with its annual per capita income reaching 39,000 yuan, exceeding the national average of 26,000 yuan.
Its modern high-rise buildings and sleek highways are a dramatic departure from the early years. There are amenities such as 40 city parks, a golf course, a library, a science and technology center, a gymnasium and an Olympicsized public swimming pool.
Karamay has been diversifying the city’s economy away from sole reliance on exploiting oil and gas resources in the Junggar Basin.
“Rather than awaiting another fall in oil prices, we’re much better off taking advantage of our oil and gas production to initiate industrial restructuring,” Wang Gang, mayor of Karamay, said.
In a resource-based city undergoing transformation, livelihoods should be the priority, he said. Special attention has been paid to developing three new industries: finance, information and tourism.
The measures introduced have extended the industrial chain to downstream sectors, improving the city’s economic structure and enhancing its capacity to cope with risks.
Livelihood projects such as tree planting, the building of senior day care centers, community healthcare, and food safety cooperatives have created a livable environment.
Tourism has become Karamay’s most vibrant industry, said Shi Jian, deputy director of the city’s tourism bureau.
Visitors made 6.2 million trips to the city in the first nine months of this year, up 48 percent year-on-year, he said, while tourism income rose 46 percent year-on-year to 9.2 billion yuan.
“Developing the tourism market is an appropriate path for Karamay’s transformation from a single-product economy to a diversified economy,” he said.
Wang said the next step in Karamay’s development is to become a vibrant, varied place to live, attracting new blood and offering a much broader range of social, economic and cultural resources.
Achieving that in a remote city like Karamay won’t be easy.
But the city authorities are confident that continued reliance on the resilience of its people will make the impossible possible once again.