The new face of coal in China

The world’s newest carbon citadel rises up between the blasted deserts of Inner Mongolia and the coal-black lands of Shaanxi Province.

Ordos is a city that few outside China know. But the future of global warming looks increasingly more likely to be set in industrial powerhouses like this than in the negotiating halls of Copenhagen.

While the world’s countries struggle to reach a treaty to defeat climate change, Chinese miners and scientists here are ramping up production and finding new ways to burn and bury carbon that will shape the policies of the world’s biggest polluting nation.

Ordos is the new face of coal in China. It is home to the world’s biggest coal company and an industrial-scale experiment to turn coal into diesel that could create a major new source of greenhouse gases. At the same time, it hosts the planet’s most efficient mine and one of China’s biggest carbon capture and storage projects, which buries the gases blamed for global warming.

China’s emissions were expected to be on the agenda when Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) met US President Barack Obama yesterday. The summit brought together the two countries that together account for 40 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases.

China is trying to use science to clean up and expand coal production, which is good news for the local environment but potentially disastrous for the planet’s climate. Both trends are apparent at Ordos. The discovery of extensive coal and gas deposits has turned this outpost into a boom town. The past and future of coal are apparent at the district’s southern border. On one side of the Huojitu River is the traditional mining region of Shaanxi Province. Dirty, inefficient and dangerous, this is the face of Chinese coal that the outside world has grown used to.

At the small Bandingliang colliery, the pit has been dug so far into the hillside that truck drivers take 30 minutes to reach the coalface, fill up and return with their load.

“We drill holes,” said Zhao Zhaoguo, a migrant from Henan Province on his way down the shaft. “We stuff explosive inside, then a detonator. We set it off, and then, ‘voom’ —there’s a big bang.”

Such techniques have made China’s mines the deadliest and most inefficient in the world, But they are changing.

Prompted by Hu’s drive for “scientific development”, the government is on a drive to reduce waste, improve safety and boost productivity. Many small private collieries in the area have been shut down. Managers at Bandingliang say they have been given a choice of modernization or closure. Next door, work is under way on a new mine that will have new equipment and more than twice the production capacity.

“In the future all we will have to do is press a button, and the coal will just come up by itself,” Zhao said.

That vision is closest to coming true just a few kilometers away in Inner Mongolia, now the No. 1 region for coal production in China. Heavy industry has followed the fuel. That trend and the low population density has given Inner Mongolia the highest per capita carbon dioxide emissions in China.

But much of the industry here is more modern, efficient and “clean” than that of China’s old rustbelt cities. Shenhua, the world’s biggest coal firm, runs several mega-mines in the region, the most advanced of which is the fully automated Shangwan pit, which produces more than 1 million tonnes of coal a month with just 300 workers. On the outside at least, the state-owned company’s pit resembles a garden. The Chinese Communist Party mine secretary, Wang Tianliang, is proud.