CHINA’S DIRTIEST SECRET

1,000 coal-fired power stations – and climbing. A single complex two-thirds the size of LA. As the West beggars itself to cut emissions (and UK grinds to a halt), China’s huge energy pollution mocks the globe’s green ambitions... as revealed in the first

THE billowing clouds of steam and smoke are visible from miles away. As night falls and the lights turn the sky neon bright the chimneys keep pumping out their toxic fumes. This is the Ningdong Energy and Chemical Industry Base, one of the biggest industrial complexes in the world.

Sprawling in semi-desert far to the west of Beijing, it covers an area so vast – 883 square kilometres, more than two-thirds the size of Los Angeles – it is almost unimaginable.

Much of The Base, as it is known locally, is home to mines, which produce 130million metric tonnes of coal a year. The coal – the most polluting of all fossil fuels – is fed into an array of huge power stations, which have the capacity to generate 17.3 gigawatts.

Also to be found at The Base are 32 companies that use coal to make chemicals, so generating still more carbon pollution. And on top of all this is the showpiece: the world’s largest coalto-liquid (CTL) plant, run by the state-owned Shenhua Ningxia Coal Industry Group.

Simply burning coal is dirty enough, producing more carbon dioxide than any other method of generating electricity – almost twice as much as burning natural gas. But making oil from coal is far worse: it can double the amount of CO2 pumped into the atmosphere from every unit

of energy.

YET China’s Shenhua group – now restructured as part of China Energy – has been investing heavily in this hugely polluting CTL plant. No Western journalist has ever been allowed to visit the site. But in 2017 a Chinese researcher, Xing Zhang, was given a tour by the firm’s vice chairman, Dr Yao Min.

Her findings, written up in a blog for the International Energy Agency (IEA), revealed that Shenhua had by then invested 55 billion yuan – or €7.3 billion – in the CTL plant alone.

Each year, the plant turns 20million tonnes of coal into four million tonnes of oil products; 2.7million tonnes of diesel; a million tonnes of naptha petroleum; and 340,000 tonnes of liquid gas. And The Base is not China’s only large CTL plant. There are at least six others that are already built or under construction – and China says it plans to build still more in nations where it has lavished investment, such as Pakistan.

Yet The Base accounts for just a fraction of China’s coal dependency. Its coal power station fleet grew five-fold between 2000 and 2020, and now accounts for almost half the world’s consumption. It is said to have 1,080 separate plants with a total capacity last year of 1,005 gigawatts – and is building more.

Last week, UK prime minister Boris Johnson urged China – by far the world’s worst emitter of greenhouse gases, producing as much as 28% of the global total – to end its domestic use of coal.

Mr Johnson is only too aware that if Cop26, the UN climate conference to be held in Glasgow in November, is not to be regarded as a dismal failure, China must be persuaded to make meaningful cuts in CO2 emissions.

But far from carbon emissions slowing down in China, they are increasing ever more rapidly.

Between 2011 and 2013, China used more cement than the US did in the entire 20th century. It produces almost 60% of the world’s steel and its oil refinery capacity has tripled since 2000.

EVEN though it promised last week to stop building coal power stations abroad, China continues to do just that at home. Last year, its coalpowered capacity rose by 38 gigawatts, while the rest of the world cut capacity by 17 gigawatts.

China has a further 105 gigawatts of new coal capacity in the construction pipeline. Last month, the Workers’ Daily reported that in Inner Mongolia, 38 coal mines have been reopened, with an annual production of 60million tonnes.

Last year, Inner Mongolia dug up more than a billion tonnes of coal – and this did not even make it China’s biggest coal province: that honour belonged to Shanxi.

China’s president, Xi Jinping, claimed last year that although Chinese emissions would keep rising until 2030, they would then reach their peak and decline, eventually reaching Net Zero by 2060 – ten years after Ireland.

But he has given few details on how this might be achieved, and there are ominous signs that he has no intention of keeping his word. When US climate change envoy, John Kerry, went to Beijing this month to put pressure on the regime on carbon emissions, he was humiliated.

Kerry was forced to hold his meetings via Zoom and China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi warned him that if America wanted China to talk seriously about emissions,