Cleaner Greener China

While Greenpeace may be known globally for the rainbow warrior and the high profile means by which they look to make their point, in China they are making their point through solid pieces of research on the environmental impacts of China’s development.

In their most recent research,  Greenpeace has manage to calculate that China’s top 3 power firms (China Huaneng Group, China Datang Corp and China Guodian Corp) are putting out more carbon than then entire United Kingdom.  Part of a larger program, to rank China’s power firms by emissions, Greenpeace’s method essentially used China’s own data to develop the figures:

Greenpeace calculated emissions estimates by using fuel data combined with Chinese government figures on the amount of carbon dioxide produced when coal is burnt in China’s power stations.

A concise 8 pages (download report here), the report is an interesting read  – althoughI am always skeptical of any measurements of these nature given the huge variances that are sure to exist -  and while the comparison between China’s top 10 polluters band the UK may be done for added shock value, the does credit areas where progress has been made:

• All of the top ten Chinese power companies have met the target in the 11th 5-year-plan to reduce the average coal consumption to 355 grams per kWh of coal power generation
• In the past three-and-half years, the amount of inefficient coal-fired plants closed down in China reached 54.07 GW,
  more than the total installed electricity capacity of Australia.
• By the end of 2008, only one out of the top ten power companies had reached the mandatory renewable (nonhydro)
  energy obligation of 3%

For me the one data point that was the most interesting was the Carbon Dioxide Intensity figure.  For China’s  top 10 power firms, only 1 (3 Gorges hydro) was UNDER 700 grams of carbon dioxide per kWh of power produced, while other nations compared score far higher

In Japan, 418 grams of carbon dioxide are emitted for each kWh of power generation; in Germany, 497 grams of carbon dioxide are emitted and, in the US, 625 grams of carbon dioxide are emitted

Thus showing that while significant gains are being made in the production efficiency of its plants, efficiencies that put it on par with other nations, the data shows that there processes to squeeze energy from coal are far more polluting.  That, either through the use of poorer qualities of coal or through poorer equipment, China’s firms are still pumping out 2-3 times the amount of CO2 than they would were they using equipment found in Japan

A point that I will explore further in another post, but I’ll make my central point now.

If China were to simply mandate the installation technologies CURRENTLY available in Japan by the top 10 power producers, China would have the potential to reduce their carbon emissions by roughly 40%.  That is before CCS, cap and trade, green taxes, or the development of future technologies…. and that is HUGE on many levels for cleantech, Copenhagen, and everyone else who is looking to China for leadership on this issue.