China has the money to begin cleaning up a subcontinent fouled by 30 years of unsupervised industrial development. But how much is it actually doing?

Russia’s prime minister, Vladimir Putin, visited Beijing in October, and many agreements were signed. Trade between Russia and China is around $60bn annually and oil is a lot of that. Most of it currently arrives by rail, but a new 15 million ton pa pipeline is expected to enter service by the end of 2010.

China’s natural gas demand is expected to triple by 2030 (1) and the Chinese would also like to import large amounts of natural gas from Russia. The framework agreement being negotiated would make China the biggest single customer for natural gas from Gazprom (Russia’s monopoly) (2). However, that is contingent on an elusive settlement over the price of gas. Once that agreement is reached, several years will be needed to build pipelines. In parallel to these negotiations, a 6,500-km long pipeline from Turkmenistan is nearing completion, to bring 30bn cubic metres of natural gas to China.

China’s appetite for fossil fuels has been growing steadily. One day after Putin’s visit, an agreement was signed between Chinese and Kazakh prime ministers to increase the capacity of the Kazakhstan-China oil pipeline from 10m to 20m tons a year. The growth in demand is such that China will become the world’s largest energy consumer within five years.

This is besides the climbing production of China’s main source of fossil fuel: coal. During the past 35 years, Chinese coal consumption has jumped six-fold, to nearly 2.5bn tons annually, over 40% of global coal consumption. This level of fossil fuel utilisation causes huge amounts of carbon dioxide emissions: statistics show China’s total CO2 emissions surging ahead, even beyond US levels.

Emissions diplomacy

The US and the UK now agree that climate change is related to carbon dioxide emissions and limiting them will not be possible unless the Chinese can be convinced to join in reducing them. One dominant idea is to capture CO2 and store it in underground geological formations. But market technology for this is not available, and testing technology is expensive; not all who profess their faith in this procedure to want to fund its development, and there are numerous legal issues over risks and liabilities. Who owns and is therefore responsible for the behaviour of the CO2 stored underground?

About 30 employees of the British Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) are trying to convince Beijing to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. The FCO has co-opted British academics, and Chatham House, home of the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London, has mobilised engaging young negotiators to talk to the Chinese on the subject. But China suffers the stresses of balancing power generation capacity with sharply rising demand for electricity. Are people who cannot use electrostatic precipitators because the grid needs more power likely to listen to arguments about CO2 emissions?

The old Chinese official line was that suppressing CO2 emissions would be too expensive, but Beijing is now image conscious. The Chinese participate in climate change discussions and sophisticated negotiators agree with western delegates in being concerned about the greenhouse effect. Yet coal fired power stations are being constructed, rapidly, and there are about 40 projects in development for building coal gasifiers. These produce a combustible gas mixture used to generate electric power or synthesise chemicals. Many of these aim to replace gasifiers nearing the end of their useful lives, but some are for new installations.

Most coal utilisation emits trace amounts of mercury, arsenic, lead, cadmium and selenium, highly toxic materials; when coal consumption reaches billions of tons, something has to be done. In nearly all installations in China (and elsewhere in the world, including the US), most of the mercury and selenium are released into the atmosphere. In North America, US mercury settles in pristine northern Canadian lakes, where authorities are beginning to take measures. Other trace elements are released into the terrestrial, often underground, environment. Pollution of ground water is widespread and not just in China.

Eco-city satellite

In Beijing, the government is beginning to show concern towards environmental disasters, and to showcase that concern, for instance in the “Dongtan project”.

Chongming Island and its two neighbours are near the mouth of the Yangtze River, about an hour’s ferry ride from central Shanghai. The islands became famous in 2004 when it was decided they would anchor a tunnel and bridge system linking the eastern tip of Shanghai’s PuDong district with Jiangsu province across the river. The project included the construction of Dongtan, the “eco-city” satellite intended to house half a million affluent young people.

Much was made of Dongtan’s intended energy self-sufficiency at a meeting on Chongming in summer 2006. I did my sums and reported that it was unlikely that Dongtan and associated installations could produce more than a fraction of its energy and power requirements. (I was surprised that my report was received calmly.) The immense shadow of a power station looms on the Jiangsu shore, but Dongtan is still showcased as a symbol of China’s desire to clean up.

I asked an energy guru at Shanghai Jiaotong University why there was no interest in the millions of tons of raw sewage currently dumped in the river. Changing that would be low-tech, but it would be cheap, effective and improve public health. He looked at me intently before disappearing among the crowd of delegates; he returned half an hour later, and said: “I talked to the man from the ministry. He says this is an interesting idea.” Surely I didn’t discover the elephant in the room?

Recent reports from villages near smelting plants in Fujian province note high levels of lead (lead poisoning) in the blood of children; there are similar reports from Hunan and Shaanxi. The catalogue of industrial and urban pollution in China is vast, and the Chinese estimate 10bn tons of accumulated municipal waste has been dumped in the countryside. There is a 21m-ton steel plant, with coke ovens and blast furnaces, within the city limits of Taiyuan, capital of Shanxi province in north-central China. Even near Beijing, power stations do not operate existing dust capture facilities (electrostatic precipitation) because the power they need is needed even more by the grid. Before the 2008 Olympics, the sun was barely visible in Beijing; some improvements made for the Olympics have been retained.

The Chinese government is starting to notice adverse public reaction to environmental disasters. China combines unique levels of environmental pollution with an immense portfolio of US government bonds. It has the money, but the clean up has barely started. The frustrated environmental czar recently appointed in Beijing freely briefs against the system.

Those who have watched Chinese development argue that it’s time to approach the Chinese authorities over public health, especially that of young Chinese. It will cost money but China has money. The Chinese authorities might have to remember the old motto that helped shape present-day China: “serve the people”.