[科技前沿]中國能源問題兩難——清潔城市和不清潔煤能

中國正在大力建造清潔城市和宣揚使用可再生清潔能源同時，然而中國的煤炭能源的一步擴大使用正在阻礙這種努力。總所周知，煤炭來來是中國的主要能源之一，僅在”中國火爐”重慶，每年就有幾千個礦工因爲挖煤而失去自己的寶貴生命，如何減少對煤炭的依賴，快速建立清潔城市呢？

Clean Cities and Dirty Coal Power--China's Energy Paradox（矛盾）

CHONGQING—This year China surpassed (超越)the U.S. as the world’s largest emitter（釋放者） of greenhouse gases. And coal is largely to blame. The dirty black rock is burned everywhere, from industrial boilers to home stoves, and generates 75 percent of the nation’s electricity. More than 4,000 miners die every year digging the fossil fuel （挖煤）out of China’s heartland. One consequence of the country’s reliance on coal is most visible in the air. Smog cloaks cities, reducing the sky to little more than a blue patch amid a blanket of haze. As the pollution builds, it forms a brown cloud, visible from space, that in a week’s time crosses the Pacific Ocean to the western U.S., where it accounts for as much as 15 percent of the air pollution.

The haze means no true horizon can be seen when one is walking the streets of Chong­qing, an inland port city on the Yangtze River that produces most of China’s motorcycles as well as other industrial goods. It seems the entire Rust Belt （美國工業老區，傳統的製造業中心）of the U.S. has been crammed into this “furnace of China,（中國的火爐）” as it is known—a single community of more than 30 million people, twice the size of the New York City metropolitan region.

Chongqing’s men, women and children breathe air filled with lung-clogging soot and smoke（可以進入呼吸道的沒煤灰微粒）. Nationally, health care associated with respiratory ills（呼吸道疾病） costs China an estimated $100 billion a year, according to the World Bank（世界銀行）. Furthermore, the foul air can literally stunt the growth of the next generation, according to recent research from Frederica P. Perera of Columbia University and her Chinese colleagues.

The Chinese have been burning coal for centuries. They now consume 2.5 billion tons a year—more than double that of the U.S.—and imports are rising despite extensive domestic mining. In 2007 the country’s 541 coal-fired power plants pumped out 554,420 megawatts（兆瓦） of electricity, according to the Chinese State Electricity Regulatory Commission（中國國家電力監管委員會）—roughly equivalent to the output of 550 large nuclear reactors. On average, China opens one coal-fired plant every week to serve its 1.3 billion people and the massive industries that manufacture cheap goods, largely for the U.S. and Europe.

Notwithstanding its deeply polluted state, China is also working feverishly(興奮地) to clean up. It plans to reduce pollutants（污染物） by as much as 10 percent over the next five years. Part of the effort involves creating carbon-neutral cities and expanding renewable energy sources, as described in the stories that follow. Much of the strategy, however, is simply to shutter small, inefficient coal plants and replace them with larger ones that are more efficient. “To close small plants, it will be very effective to improve air quality,” Sarah Liang, a spokesperson in Greenpeace’s Beijing office, tells me. But that still leaves a load of pollution.

Greener Generation（更環保的能源生產）

Despite the surfeit（過量） of soot（菸灰）, the average Chinese citizen accounts for a mere fraction(一小部分) of the greenhouse emissions of the average American. Sheer population overcomes the small per capita number, however, and the country is not bound by any international treaty to reduce its pollution.

Nevertheless, the government has at least started to tackle the problem by launching a pilot project to capture and store the carbon dioXide (CO2) produced from burning coal at a demonstration power plant dubbed GreenGen.

The project, in the Yellow Sea port city of Tianjin northeast of here, will proceed in three phases. First, a consortium of power and coal companies will construct a so-called integrated gasification (氣化)combined cycle power plant. In this design, coal is converted into a gas, and pollutants are removed before the gas is burned. Such technology could cut acid rain–causing sulfur dioxide emissions by more than 90 percent and smog-forming nitrous oxides by 75 percent—as well as capturing more than 80 percent of the CO2 emitted by 2015 and storing it in nearby depleted （大大減少的）oil fields.

The $1-billion GreenGen plant became the world’s leading clean coal project in January after the U.S. government pulled the plug on FutureGen, a similar demonstration plant in Mattoon, Ill., that lost steam as construction costs skyrocketed（突升）. The cancellation came despite the fact that the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and leaders of the world’s eight richest nations (the G8), including President George W. Bush, had called the development of clean coal technology essential to preventing the consequences of climate change.

Completing GreenGen, which will generate up to 250 megawatts of electricity, may prove daunting, however. “There’s no co-benefit to doing the carbon capture and storage,” says energy technology expert Kelly Sims Gallagher of Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. “There’s an argument for doing GreenGen in terms of research and getting experience with it, but from a commercial point of view it doesn’t make sense.” The reason: extra energy is consumed to turn the coal into gas and subsequently to then capture the CO2—in effect requiring the burning of more coal to generate the same amount of electricity.

GreenGen is a for-profit power plant, so economic gains or losses will determine whether its owners ever proceed with the capture-and-storage step. One argument in its favor would be to pump the extracted CO2 into underperforming oil wells to recover more of the oil. In an environment where oil is more expensive than ever, that approach could be “economically viable and valuable for nations that are rich in coal,” says Vic Svec, a senior vice president at U.S. coal giant Peabody, which is part owner of GreenGen.

Better Enforcement Needed(需要更有效的管理)

Residents of Chongqing got a glimpse of cleaner skies in the years leading up to the recent Olympics, as factories were shifted to the outskirts of towns and small, inefficient coal power plants were closed to clear the air for visiting media and tourists. “When I was young, the sky was green, and we [could not] see stars at night,” says local government official David Lee, a lifelong Chongqing resident. “This year we see blue skies and stars. We think it’s much better.”

The air can still be tasted on the tongue, however, and felt in the lungs. And it still obscured the horizon for this observer. Among the culprits （罪犯）are companies that flout （輕視）clean air laws—as well as lackluster efforts to enforce those laws. Factories and power plants turn on the pollution-­control equipment when government officials visit, but when they leave the controls are shut off to boost power production. “The government cannot check every day,” Lee says. But regulators “need to enforce the environmental laws if they want blue skies,” insists Li Junfeng, secretary general of the Chinese Renewable Energy Industries Association.

Other cities, such as Zhengzhou in China’s most populous province of Henan, have little hope of clear skies any time soon. The atmosphere in the provincial capital is thick with pollution because the movement of factories and power plants away from signature cities such as Beijing has put them closer to less well-known metropolises.

Despite a ban on coal burning and $17 billion spent on clean air measures in the past decade, smog is still an issue in Beijing, in part because cars have proliferated in recent years. “It is bitter air that you can feel,” says resident Timothy Hui, a program manager in the Beijing office of the Natural Resources Defense Council, a U.S.-based environmental group. “People hate it. They complain.”

Some analysts place part of the blame on Western countries. A full 23 percent of China’s greenhouse gas emissions can be linked to the production of goods exported to the West, according to the Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research in England. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University put the share even higher: at 33 percent.

That demand doesn’t absolve（赦免） China from cutting back on noxious emissions or taking more responsibility for the fate of the world’s climate, which in no small part will be forged in the crucible of its industrial cities. “Gradual warming of the earth’s atmosphere is caused by the developing countries as well as the developed countries,” says Wang Xiansheng, professor of English at Zhengzhou University. “The whole world should get united to deal with the problem.”

Keke View：有關專家預測，在今後50年內煤炭仍將長期是我國的主要能源。煤炭工業要在“十一五”期間實現資源節約型、環境友好型和走新型工業化道路的發展目標，確保國家能源安全，必須大力發展煤炭科技，促進科技成果的轉化，不斷提高煤炭資源安全開採與潔淨利用的水平。成立能源與安全科技園，組建技術研發平臺，轉化能源科技成果，有利於促進我國煤炭工業、能源工業實現節約發展、清潔發展、安全發展以及可持續發展。