Everything You Think You Know About Coal in China Is Wrong
By Melanie Hart, Luke Bassett, and Blaine Johnson Posted on May 15, 2017, 12:01 am
See also: “Research Note on U.S. and Chinese Coal-Fired Power Data” by Melanie Hart, Luke Bassett, and Blaine Johnson
China’s energy markets send mixed signals about the nation’s policy intentions and emissions trajectory. Renewable energy analysts tend to focus on China’s massive renewable expansion and view the nation as a global clean energy leader; coal proponents and climate skeptics are more likely to focus on the number of coal plants in China—both in operation and under construction—and claim its climate rhetoric is more flash than substance.
In December 2016, the Center for American Progress brought a group of energy experts to China to find out what is really happening. We visited multiple coal facilities—including a coal-to-liquids plant—and went nearly 200 meters down one of China’s largest coal mines to interview engineers, plant managers, and local government officials working at the front lines of coal in China.
We found that the nation’s coal sector is undergoing 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 overdeliver on the emissions reduction commitments it put forward under the Paris climate agreement, and making coal cleaner is an integral part of the process.
…
China is greening its coal fleet
Beijing is stuck between a rock and a hard place. On the one hand, China cannot eradicate coal-fired power from its energy mix overnight. China has not yet figured out how to develop its own natural gas supplies—which are more difficult to access and therefore more expensive than those in the United States—and renewable energy expansion takes time. On the other hand, Chinese citizens are demanding cleaner air, and they want immediate improvements. Air quality is now a political priority for the Chinese Communist Party on par with economic growth and corruption. This means that China cannot continue to run the same high-pollution coal plants that were considered acceptable decades ago. Beijing’s solution is to move full speed ahead with renewables while simultaneously investing in what may become the most efficient, least polluting coal fleet the world has ever seen.
Not all coal-fired power is created equal. Emissions and efficiency—the latter being the amount of coal consumed per unit of power produced, which also affects emissions—vary dramatically based on the type of coal and coal-burning technology used. What many U.S. analyses of China’s coal sector overlook is the fact that Beijing has been steadily shutting down the nation’s older, low-efficiency, and high-emissions plants to replace them with new, lower-emitting coal plants that are more efficient that anything operating in the United States.
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The Center for American Progress was founded by John Podesta in 2003, the same John Podesta who later went on to run Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. Podesta has been associated with the Clintons since at least the mid 90s.
I find it fascinating that such a well connected left wing organisation has made such an effort to sing the praises of Chinese coal.
The argument that China has no choice other than to use coal for the time being, because they don’t have access to easily recoverable gas like the USA does, is utter nonsense. Even if China does have more difficulty accessing gas than the USA, if China really wanted to cut CO2 emissions, they could simply expand their already substantial zero emissions nuclear fleet.
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To follow americanprogress.org is a waste of time – unless you get well paid for it.
Anyone have any idea why this article cannot be shared on Facebook? Error msg: “We had trouble using the URL you provided. Please try again later.” Not just happening to me.
P.S. No problem posting to Twitter, however.
Potemkin Village.
If china has coal, they also have gas. But gas takes investment in technology AND distribution systems. The ROI is too slow for their progress.
I’ll bet they all had a good laugh after CAP’s “experts” left.
It’s a dumping ground for Green waste, which creates an illusion of low impact technology.
Podesta has been a major driver of the AGW agenda. He was Bill Clinton’s Chief of Staff. He founded the Center for American Progress with money from “progressive” billionaires, such as Sandler and Soros. Climate Progress is part of the CAP outfit, Joe Romm is a Senior Fellow at CAP.
Carol Browner, former Obama climate czar, EPA head under Bill Clinton, a former Vice -President of Socialist International, a member of Hillary’s re-election team and a long time architect of the EPA Endangerment finding, is on the board at CAP, as is Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton’s Secretary of State.
https://www.americanprogress.org/about/c3-board/
In turn Browner is a “Senior Counsellor” at Madeleine Albright’s Albrightstonebridge group,
http://www.albrightstonebridge.com/team/carol-browner
http://www.albrightstonebridge.com/team/madeleine-k-albright
They have all been at this a long time:
http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/editorials/archives/2010/03/30/2003469274
“Some of the planet’s most powerful paymasters will gather in London tomorrow to discuss a nagging financial problem: How to raise US$1 trillion for the developing world. Those charged with achieving this daunting goal will include British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, directors of several central banks, the billionaire philanthropist George Soros, the economist Lord Nicholas Stern and Larry Summers, US President Barack Obama’s chief economics adviser.
In effect, the world’s top financiers have been told to work out how to raise at least US$100 billion a year for the rest of this decade, cash that will be used to help the world’s poorest countries adapt to climate change.”
Obviously Eric’s knowledge of Chinese nuclear is a touch wanting, since China is building nearly as many new nuclear plants as the rest of the world, and has plans fro hundreds in the decades ahead AND not only can build plants faster and cheaper than the only US company (well, half U.S.) Westinghouse, which has had a devil of a time getting U.S. suppliers to produce the parts of their reactors. The Chinese also are quite capable of producing reactors every bit as good as any made by any (partial) U.S. company. The Chinese are ALSO going full speed ahead on molten salt nuclear reactor designs, the design that clearly will make current light water reactor designs obsolete from every standpoint: safety, cost, etc etc. As I recall, the Chinese were going to build LPG terminals to receive the cheap nat gas produced by fracking, and operate gas powered generators.
Didn’t Westinghouse just go bust?
Westinghouse went into bankruptcy due to cost overruns caused by regulatory changes brought about by lawsuits by green activists. The claim by Westinghouse was that the additional regulations caused unnecessary increases in cost and delays that increased cost for little to no improvement in safety. This is in their submission to the court.
They are re-organizing. Whether it will be sold off depends. The nuclear fuel plants still provide fuel rods.
CAP praises them because they’ve already embraced communism. The real goal of the Climate Hoax.
Just like in 1919 when journalist Lincoln Steffans accompanied a Woodrow Wilson delegation to Lenin’s Russia. When asked what it was like he said “I have been over into the future-and it works.” (A quote from Modern Times by Paul Johnson ).
Stupid Liberals.
You’re surprised that they sing the praises of Chinese coal? You haven’t noticed that these people are simply anti-American and anti-capitalism?
https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/green/news/2008/12/22/5324/the-clean-coal-smoke-screen/
The smoke screen huh? Everything really is backwards to these people. How dumb would you actually need to believe that Chinese coal is cleaner and more efficient than in America? Maybe the deaf and blind get a pass, but everyone else…
http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2016/11/04/17/3A0E7A1300000578-0-image-m-108_1478281273955.jpg
The article mentioned that the newest plants were clean.
Most of the pollution in that picture is not coming from power plants.
“We found that the nation’s coal sector is undergoing a massive transformation that extends from the mines to the power plants, from Ordos to Shanghai.”
I don’t know if the above statement is deliberately misleading or accidently ignorant. But even taking in a broad sense, from Ordos to Shanghai does not seem to encompass the nation.
Progressives are far more about the end goal of their activism than whatever they may say about the immediate issue. So of course they give China (and India and Africa) a pass. Their end goal can be deduced when you see how clearly their demands converge on socialism (bigger government, less liberty, fewer choices, higher costs, more restrictions, less human prosperity, slower economic growth) far more than they converge on materially improving the environment.
Well, Progressive Greenies are as much anti-American as they are anything else. That’s why the narrative invariably villainizes the US, no matter what apologistic gyrations of logic they have to use to get there.
How do we know that the bulk of the pollution is coming from coal-fired electric power plants rather from domestic heating and cooking stoves?
It had been said that perhaps rural electrification, even if it is coal-fired, would go a long way to cleaning the air?
A lot (at least in parts of China) of the pollution comes from steam heat. With population density they can pipe in heat. What I saw was that they were very thrifty with electricity. Did not have clothes dryers, poor lighting at night (an open gas station there darker than most closed ones here). But steam heat- it was plenty warm though 5 degrees outside, and would regulate in places by opening the window.
Oh gosh, I find myself agreeing with Eric. I looked and looked for a reason not to.
While it is admirable that China has shifted from slave labor coal to adopting modern mining practices for worker safety, doing it 100 years after those practices were adopted in the US is not leadership.
Starting to clean up the environment 70 years after we started, is not leadership.
When comes to leadership in energy and the environment, we did not see any from Clinton/Gore. It was Bush who pushed revision of coal power plant regulations. The measure of regulations is how clean our air is in the US. Air quality is good. airnow.gov
😉
Well yes, of course its okay when China does it. They’re already communist. No need for change in that utopia!!!
The U.S. and western Europe, on the other hand, need to clean up their act. Capitalism makes people free to consume vast amounts of energy and resources and creates a middle class. What could be worse?
/sarc off
They are right about plant efficiencies. The average US coal plant was built in 1962. The oldest date from the 40’s.
If the entire US coal fleet was converted to the newest ultra-supercritical designs, there would be an immediate 40% reduction in coal consumption and pollution of all types. The largest step reduction in pollution in history.
And it’s prevented by US regulation that locks in old plant technology by making upgrades prohibitively expensive. Insanity.
40% reduction? BS. Back that up!
Well when you have 100 MW input with .35 efficiency, you get 35 MW net.
If you have 60 MW input with .60 efficiency, you get the same.
So I guess you get 40% reduction and the same power.
(The numbers were yours. I know nothing about this.)
DOC:
YOU HAVE NOT GOT A CLUE!!!!
Yeah yeah, I see you said natural gas. The CO2 emissions drop more than 40%.
What you are talking about is the difference between gross and net. Internal auxiliary loads reduce how much gets to the grid. For a coal plant with major AQCS, aux might be around 15-20%. For a NG Rankine plant, maybe 2-5%. No pulverisers or big fans. That is not efficiency.
The industry jargon is heat rate: Btu/kWh. It’s an archaic form of expressing inverse efficiency. A typical value would be 9,000 Btu/kWh. You put in 9,000 Btu/h of fuel to generate/get out each 1 MW. Equivalent efficiency is 3,412 / 9,000 = 37.9%. So 37.9% of the fuel energy input gets converted to electricity.
NG produces less CO2/MWh because it gets a lot more Btu from hydrogen. Carbon is 14,000 Btu/lb, H2 is 60,000 Btu/lb. CH4 is 25% hydrogen, coals run 5% to 10% hydrogen.
The CPP plan CO2 performance goals were written to specifically cripple coal generation and give NG a free pass especially CCPP, basically making it impossible for coal to meet without extremely expensive sequestration and NG to just proceed as usual.
“Beijing has been steadily shutting down the nation’s older, low-efficiency, and high-emissions plants to replace them with new, lower-emitting coal plants that are more efficient that anything operating in the United States.”
The US is doing the same, replacing old coal generation with NG fueled CCPP which are 60% efficient instead of 35%.
The difference in efficiency between sub-critical, supercritical, and ultra supercritical coal fired designs is due to expanding the thermodynamic boundaries of steam pressure and temperature. The efficiency improvements are on the order of 10 to 15 percentage points. Whoopeee!!
As to more efficient than anything operating in the US – patently untrue. J.W. Turk and Comanche 3 come to mind.
When will journalists start doing actual fact-based research for their fake news articles? Or is there not enough money in that?
Probably never, because doing actual research is hard work. But these aren’t even real (ha!) journalists: they started with a policy directive to push the US to renewable energy and then looked for something resembling facts to justify it. As I noted earlier, their “comparison” was between the entire US fleet of coal plants and a selected set of the newer, larger Chinese ones.
I think society should pay more attention to this problem.
I didn’t read the whole article but was struck by the disparity between the two stats given early. In the top 100 plants, China outputs about 92 % as much CO2 as the U.S. per GW output. I don’t see how that is hugely better than the performance of the older generating systems used in the U.S. But if their coal burning efficiency is 76% as efficient as ours due to the more advanced plants being installed, why aren’t their CO2 emissions similarly lower at about 76%. What am I missing?
Ah so I did a bit of digging, and the answer to my question may come down to the kind of coal that is being burned. The U.S. burns mostly bitumous coal and sub-bituminous coal. These types of coal output less CO2 than other types because they have more BTU output per ton due to a greater hydrogen content. China’s coal reserves are primarily anthracite and lignite which have less hydrogen and less heat output per ton and hence more CO2 output per ton burned. The authors go to the trouble to discuss the types of generators, but make no mention of the importance of coal type on CO2 emissions. Hmmmmm….
BTW, I loved this bit of spin, “The United States only has one ultra-supercritical power plant. Everything else is subcritical or, at best, supercritical.” The order of the categories would leave a reader thinking that most of the U.S. generators are subcritical. But their infographic shows that U.S. stations are 69% supercritical and 30% subcritical. Why not just say the simple truth? More than two-thirds of U.S. stations are supercritical and all but one of the remaining are subcritical.
For a typical Rankine (steam) design power plant about 15% +/- of the fuel energy goes up the stack, about 35% +/- gets turned into electricity, about 50% +/- is in the condensing of the exhaust steam, that heat showing up in the vapor plumes from the cooling towers or in the cooling lake or river. This is the same whether sub, super or ultra.
Ultra super didn’t become popular until the metallurgy advanced enough for the boiler tubing to survive the higher temperature, 1,150 F +. The real efficiency difference is from the steam temperature. Most existing sub/super unit steam temps were about 1,000 F to 1,050 F because that was what the alloys could handle. Raising the temperature and pressure expands the thermodynamic Carnot cycle boundaries which means that while the equipment efficiency doesn’t change, it draws on a greater potential and as a result generates more electricity for the same fuel input. High temperature and pressures are hard on the boilers and turbines and nobody knows yet how reliable these USCs will be.
The coal doesn’t make a lot of difference. Anthracite is rare and usually applied for metallurgical purposes. Bituminous and sub-bituminous coals are used the most because they are the most common. Lignite is combustible dirt and a serious pain to mine, handle and burn.
The coal doesn’t make a lot of difference to what? I’m trying to reconcile how it is that China can burn about 75% of the amount of coal that we burn in the U.S. per MW, but still produce 92% of the CO2. The type of coal seems like a reasonable explanation, but I’m open to other explanations.
Wikipedia lists shows China having pretty large Anthracite and Lignite reserves – perhaps that is a simple error in their article. They didn’t mention anything about Bituminous reserves, so I probably jumped the gun assuming that they would be burning what they had a lot of. But further reading shows that China is burning mostly bituminous. Which brings me back to the original question of why the disparity in amount of coal used and and the amount of CO2 generated?
It is worth pointing out, for the record, that the photo at the top is not a picture of coal smoke.
“Smog hangs over a construction site in Weifang city, Shandong province”
It is a photo of the smoke from the annual (illegal) burning of crop residues that lie in fields after cropping. This burning commences about 15 October each year – as soon as it is dry following the harvest is complete. The fires are lit at night to hide who did it. If there was a value placed on the biomass (for pellets) people would collect it instead.
Heating of homes starts about 15 November each year in that area. Thus it is not the ignition of a million domestic stoves, it is not from industry. Look at the colour. That is biomass smoke from smouldering crop residues.
It is the same material that India burns 550m tons of each year creating the famous ‘Brown Cloud of India’. The same burning happens (also illegally) in Hebei Province which surrounds Beijing, usually on the same days. It lasts for about 4 days, during which time organisations like the BBC and Reuters take lots of photos of the ‘terrible air quality’ of Chinese cities for use throughout the year.
At least with the example above, dates are clearly marked so people in the know understand they are looking at smoke from biomass smouldering in fields, not coal fire pollution from incomplete combustion.
The same thing happens in E. Washington and N. Idaho in the fall when grain and grass stubble is burned.
http://www.ecy.wa.gov/programs/air/pdfs/thesis_jj.pdf
They still do that?
Banned in the UK for decades…
That is good info to know. I’ll try to remember to look for photo dates.
BTW, don’t be too quick to rely upon colors in a photo. Even an un-modified photo can give the wrong colors for a variety of reasons. Just google “coal plants” and under Images you will find all kinds of interesting colors for steam. :^)
Fair enough. How about: The thick visible haze you see in Beijing, irrespective of apparent color, is almost always dust from the Gobi desert.
I’m sure coal plants near Beijing emit a lot of pollution. But the yellow haze you see in dramatic photos is largely dust blown in from the Gobi desert. These photos are akin to using images of scary-looking cooling tower steam plumes to represent clouds of industrial “pollution”.
That seems to be the case if the photo is taken in the springtime.
I thought Paris allowed China to double its CO2 output till 2030, then had to cut back? Is this saying they have already doubled their co2 levels to 2030 levels, 13 years ahead of time? Lol
The Center for American Regress is the same organization indicted in the WikiLeaks release who bragged about getting Nate Silver’s 538 website to drop Roger Pielke, Jr.. In fact, they wrote 161 articles about Pielke which was almost as many as they had written about George Bush.
http://www.denverpost.com/2016/10/27/wikileaks-exposes-liberal-groups-efforts-to-thwart-climate-writings-of-cus-roger-pielke-jr/
https://rogerpielkejr.com/2016/11/14/wikileaks-and-me/
Copy of e-mail written by John Legum of the Center. https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/19569