Coal consumption

Coal is the biggest environmental problem. According to data from BP, it causes 70 to 80 percent of China’s greenhouse gas emissions. Tsinghua researcher Qiao Ma and colleagues found that 40 to 50 percent of PM2.5 particles come from burning coal.

Coal, the source of 69 percent of total energy consumption in 2011, went down to 66 percent in 2014 and 62 percent in 2016, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. The current five-year plan calls for coal to reach 55 percent by 2020. But coal will remain a large part of the energy mix for the foreseeable future.

The Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security predicts that 1.8 million coal workers (about one-fifth of the total) and half a million iron and steel workers are likely to lose their jobs due to capacity reduction during the Five-Year Plan period. So, the transition to a cleaner, upgraded economy will be painful.

Craig Hart, a lecturer at the Johns Hopkins University Energy Policy and Climate Change Program, put it this way: “They’ve sacrificed their bodies to their work and it’s going to be hard to retrain them. And, the communities are almost entirely dependent on this industry and have suffered environmentally for it.”

Currently, China has so many excess coal-fired plants that they are, on average, running at about 48 percent of capacity, well below the optimal level. In order to control provincial and local desire to build even more coal-fired electrical power plants, China’s National Energy Administration in January canceled 103 new planned and under-construction plants. In May, the NEA prohibited 28 of China’s 31 mainland provinces from building additional plants.

The State-Owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission, which administers large State-owned enterprises, announced in January that at least 150 million metric tons of coal production facilities will be closed. In July 2016, the SASAC ordered companies under its supervision to cut coal mining capacity by 10 percent in two years and by 15 percent in five years.

However, in order to provide the power needed for continuing economic growth, the fiveyear plan calls for an installed capacity of 1,100 gigawatts of coal-fired electrical power plants, up from the current 920 gigawatts.

It may seem ironic that total coal-fired electrical capacity is planned to continue to expand while other coal capacity is being cut and plants are running at well-below capacity. This is partly due to a reluctance, especially by local and provincial governments, to close factories and lay off workers.

It can also be partly explained by improvements in coal generation technology. The current five-year plan calls for a shift toward more efficient and less polluting new “ultrasupercritical” plants that burn at very high temperatures.

Yang Dongning, associate professor of management science at Peking University’s Guanghua School of Management, says that many of the new coal plants in production are higher quality and generate less carbon emissions than the older plants that are being closed.

According to research by the Center for American Progress, a think tank in Washington, China’s new, more efficient coal plants use about 280 grams per kilowatt-hour compared with roughly 370 grams per kWh in older plants, with proportional reduction in carbon emissions.

The report concludes: “We found that the nation’s coal sector is under-going a massive transformation that extends from the mines to the power plants, from Ordos to Shanghai. China is indeed going green. The nation is on track to over-deliver on the emissions reduction commitments it put forward under