Shanxi Coke Plants Start to Clean Up Their Act
Date: 29-May-07
Country: CHINA
Author: Lucy Hornby
While most coking plants in Shanxi Province are shrouded in smoke and covered with a thick black dust, no smoke escapes from the Xinggao Coke and Chemical Group Co.'s warm ovens. Workers' faces are clean, not masked with soot.
Xinggao is a pilot project demonstrating that even in polluted Shanxi, where coal is cheap and plentiful, China can be more efficient in using energy and cutting emissions. Supported by the United Nations Development Programme, the plant uses anthracite dust and generates power from the heat of its ovens.
"Everyone thinks the coal industry is a polluting industry. Now every three days a delegation comes to learn from our experience," said vice president Hou Kang.
When Chinese think of pollution, they think of Shanxi. The province produces one quarter of China's coal, and half of its coke, which provides carbon for steelmaking. Its exports account for half of the world's coke trade.
In Shanxi, enormous power plants dot the landscape, lumps of coal line the highways, and every breeze wafts plumes of coal dust from piles of cinders the size of small hills. The sky is dingy, and lung disease widespread.
China's goal is to cut its carbon intensity, or the emissions of heat-trapping carbon dioxide (CO2) per unit of national wealth, by 40 percent by 2020, while raising energy efficiency. In Shanxi, coke plants are starting to install power plants to trap heat and gases, to get more out of each tonne of coal.
The waste heat from its production of 400,000 tonnes of coke a year heats steam for Xinggao's 15-megawatt power generator, adding to revenues and reducing the need to burn the equivalent of 46,000 tonnes of coal.
Anthracite - a hard coal not usually used for coke - contains fewer polluting impurities. Negative pressure traps gas in the ovens, cutting carbon dioxide emissions by 150,000 tonnes a year, and oven gas by 30,000 tonnes.
Xinggao has applied for clean development mechanism certification, and has agreed to sell carbon credits to a German firm once it is approved. But it initially had trouble getting loans from banks suspicious of whether the project would work.
ENFORCEMENT
As China catches up to the US as the world's top emitter of greenhouse gas, Beijing has become increasingly worried about the damage to air and water from heavily-polluting industries.
Coking plants burn off impurities from metallurgical coal, in the process releasing as many as 10,000 compounds - some of them carcinogens - into the air.
Planners have adjusted credit and tax incentives to try and limit capacity to what China will consume, and ordered stricter enforcement of environmental regulations. On Monday, China raised the export tax on coke to 15 percent from 5 percent, to cut off coking plants' access to overseas markets.
But central planners can't enforce closures of polluting plants with close ties to local governments. Citizens or local press that campaign against polluters risk harassment, arrest or censure, with almost no legal protection.
Small-scale, local enterprises account for about half of China's pollutants, according to the UNDP. In Shanxi, the polluters aren't hard to find.
An hour's drive from the Xinggao plant, the Xingwang Coal Chemistry Group.'s coke and power plant has gold lettering on its gates. Behind them, flares shoot high in the air, before being obscured by belches of sharp-smelling, greenish-yellow smoke.
The city of Changzhi charged Xingwang Coal Group 5.9 million yuan in emissions fees in the first quarter of this year, according to the city's website.
Although a Xingwang official said it was "not convenient" to be interviewed, workers were more forthcoming at another coking plant nearby that belched black smoke out of a tall chimney.
"This place will be closed sooner or later. It doesn't meet the regulations," said a soot-blackened worker.
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