China Building 16 "Coal Bases" (Syngas Centers) - Largest Is Size Of Los Angeles
China, faced with ever-worsening pollution in its major cities—a recent report deemed Beijing "barely suitable for living"—is doing what so many industrializing nations have done before it: banishing its titanic smog spewers to poor or rural areas so everyone else can breathe easier. But China isn't just relegating its dirty coal-fired power plants to the outskirts of society; for years, it's been building 16 unprecedentedly massive, brand new "coal bases" in rural parts of the country. There, they won't stifle China's megacities; they'll churn out enough pollution to help smother the entire world.
The biggest of those bases, the Ningdong Energy and Chemical Industry Base, spans nearly 400 square miles, about the size of LA. It's already operational, and seemingly always expanding. It's operated by Shenhua, one of the biggest coal companies in the world. China hopes to uses these coal bases not just to host some of the world's largest coal-fired power plants, but to use super-energy intensive technology to convert the coal into a fuel called syngas and use it to make plastics and other materials.
Syngas is healthier to breathe when burned than typical coal—but as Motherboard has noted before, synthesizing the stuff emits nearly twice the carbon pollution. That's why when Inside Climate News, the Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative environmental outfit, traveled to China to investigate the operation, they, and a number of climate experts concluded it would "doom the climate."
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It's projected to finally be finished by the end of the decade, when it will produce a jaw-dropping 30,000 MW of power, sucking down 100 million tons of coal every year in the process. And it's just one of over a dozen such sprawling operations. As such, Ningdong does a fairly good job of epitomizing China's grave threat to the global climate system. A recent paper in Nature Climate Change noted that if all of the coal-to-gas plants get built, they'd produce 21 billion tons of CO2 alone. The Washington Post's Brad Plumer puts that in context: "The entire nation of China produced 7.7 billion tons of carbon-dioxide in 2011." Put simply, China's on a path to produce an unholy amount of carbon pollution.
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http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/theres-a-coal-base-in-china-the-size-of-la
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> for years, it's been building 16 unprecedentedly massive, brand new "coal bases"
> The biggest of those bases, ... spans nearly 400 square miles, about the size of LA.
> It's already operational, and seemingly always expanding.
> (The overall project is) projected to finally be finished by the end of the decade,
> sucking down 100 million tons of coal every year
> A recent paper in Nature Climate Change noted that if all of the coal-to-gas plants
> get built, they'd produce 21 billion tons of CO2 alone.
> The entire nation of China produced 7.7 billion tons of carbon-dioxide in 2011.
Less than a decade to *treble* their CO2 output.
And this is called "progress" and "planning for the future".
How very Communist and egalitarian, comrade.
