COAL IN CHINA

China is the world's leading user and producer of coal. It burns 24 percent of the world's
coal, compared to 25.5 percent in the United States and 7 percent in India. In 2006, over
2.2 billion metric tons of coal was taken from Chinese coal mines —more than the United
States, India and Russia combined. This was up from 2.1 billion in 2005, 1.7 billion in
2003 and 1.4 billion in 2002 and 70 percent more than 2000. The figure is expected to
rise to 2.6 billion in 2010 and 3.1 billion in 2020, with coal production increasing at a rate
of 10 percent to 15 percent a year.

Coal reserves: 1) the United States (27 percent); 2) Russia (17 percent); 3) China (13
percent); 4) Australia (9 percent); 5) South Africa (5 percent); Other (19 percent). China
has 126 billion tons of coal, enough to last 75 years if consumption rates remain the
same.

coal briquettes

Coal consumption increases at a rate of 10 percent a year. In 2006, China added new
power plants with more capacity than all of Britain’s China is beginning to use coal like
oil to make liquid fuels and chemicals. The Chinese government is negotiating with the
South African firm Sasol to build coal–to-oil plants that can produce 80,000 barrels of oil
a day by 2012.

The production of coal-fired plants has slowed to some degree. They are no longer being
produced at the rate of one a week and now add 80 gigawatts of power a year, down from
100 gigawatts a few years earlier.

Coal provides China with 69 percent of its primary energy and 80 percent of it
electricity. It is relatively plentiful and cheap but very dirty. The government wants to
replace coal with oil, natural gas and hydroelectric power primarily to clean up its air.
Even so demand for coal keeps increasing as the economy grows and 60 new coal-fired
power stations go on line every year. China could become a net coal importer between
2010 and 2015.
 Even if drastic measures are taken China will still have to rely on coal for 65 percent of
its energy needs for the foreseeable future. A Chinese coal engineer told the New York
Times, "We are a developing country and we started without a very good foundation. We
have so few choices and no funding, so our industries are going to rely heavily on coal
for a long time to come." By some estimates China will have to triple its use of coal if it
wants to achieve a standard of living near that of the United States.

Coal production has been slowed by crackdowns on illegal mines and transportation
bottlenecks that keep coal from reaching all the places it is needed, This has led to a rise
of coal prices. The increase of coal prices in turn has devastated the electricity-generating
industry because companies that produce electricity are tightly regulated by the
government and are not allowed to raise prices without government approval. The
government, fearing a backlash from consumers, doesn’t want to raise prices. After coal
prices spiked in 2003 and 2004, 85 percent of coal power plants lost money.

Websites and Resources

Good Websites and Sources: U.S. Energy Information Administration Report on Coal
in China eia.doe.gov/cabs ; Worldwatch Article worldwatch.org ; China and Coal TED
Case Studies american.edu ; China Coal Resource sxcoal.com ; Wikipedia article
Wikipedia ; Good Coal Mine Safety and Deaths: Article on Coal Mine Safety
asianresearch.org ; Few Coal Mine Deaths in 2009 Reuters ; China Mine Disaster Watch
usmra.com

On Energy and Electricity: U.S. Energy Information Administration Report on Energy

in China eia.doe.gov/cabs ; U.S. Energy Information Administration Report on Electricity
in China eia.doe.gov/cabs ;China Sustainable Energy Program efchina.org ; China
Energy Report pdf file piie.com/publications ; Another Lengthy Energy China Report
ieej.or.jp ; China Energy Production Statistics indexmundi.com ; Beijing Energy Network
(a Chinese grassroots environmental group) greenleapforward.com

Links in this Website: ENERGY AND ELECTRICITY IN CHINA

Factsanddetails.com/China ; DAMS AND HYDRO POWER IN CHINA
Factsanddetails.com/China ; THREE GORGES AND THREE GORGES DAM
Factsanddetails.com/China ; COAL IN CHINA Factsanddetails.com/China ; COAL
MINE DEATHS IN CHINA Factsanddetails.com/China ; OIL AND NATURAL GAS
Factsanddetails.com/China ; CHINESE OIL AND NATURAL GAS COMPANIES
Factsanddetails.com/China ; NUCLEAR POWER AND ALTERNATIVE ENERGIES
Factsanddetails.com/China ; WATER IN CHINA Factsanddetails.com/China

Coal and Chinese Life

Coal-fired stove Coal is used at a rate of about 1.5 tons per person a year. It is used to
generate power for factories and electric plants as well as cook meals and heat homes.
China burns the stuff so fast railroads can not deliver it fast enough and Chinese ships sit
outside ports in Australia for weeks waiting for shipments of coal.

Jerry Goodell wrote in Natural History magazine: “In China coal is everywhere. It’s
piled up on sidewalks, pressed into bricks, and stacked neat the back doors of homes. It’s
stockpiled into small mountains in open fields, and carted around behinds bicycles and
wheezing locomotives. Plumes of coal smoke rise from rusty stacks on every urban
horizon. Soot covers every windowsill and ruins the collar of every white shirt. The
Chinese burn less coal per capita than America does but in sheer tonnage, they burn twice
as much.”

Water and pulverized coal are formed into cakes and bricks at farms throughout China.
Bother peasants and city dwellers use these cakes for cooking and heating. In many
places coal bricks are still delivered to people’s homes by tricycles or bicycles. One
skinny 38-year-old coalman told The Times of London, “I just ride around with no fixed
destination, just wherever people need coal to heat their homes.” Delivering coal is his
winter job. He also works on a farm in the spring and summer.

Coal has enriched a few, provided hard, low-paying jobs for many but brought misery to
many more in the form of dirty air and water and scarred landscapes. Poor scavengers
rummage through hill-size slag heaps for usable chunks of coal to heat their own homes
or sell. Describing one, Brook Larmer wrote in National Geographic, “High on one steep
incline, nearly 500 feet up, a scavenger named Chang Mingdong trawls for usable
fragments of coal, dodging fresh loads of rock careening down the embankment,
sidestepping the coal embers smoldering beneath the surface.”

See Air Pollution, Environment, Nature

Coal Producing Regions and Companies in China

 Even though China has huge coal resources, its consumption outstrips production. In
2007, China imported more coal than it exported for the first time.

Coal-producing area in Shaanxi Coal mining employs 3 million people in China. There
are about 30,000 legal coal mines in the country and the industry is growing rapidly. The
17,000 or so small mines account for a third of China’s coal output. There are thousands
more illegal mines

Much of China’s coal comes from Shaanxi, Shanxi, Inner Mongolia and Hebei
provinces. The whole province of Shanxi is like a giant coal seam. Patrick Tyler of the
New York Times, "Within a 300 mile radius” of Shanxi’s capital Datong “hundreds of
thousands of coal miners are shredding subterranean seams thicker than ocean liners and
hauling a black treasure to the surface to power the economic rise of China."

The city of Linfen lies in the heart of Shanxi’s coal country. It is located in an area with
400 mines and billions of tons of proven reserves that account for half of Shanxi’s coal
production. Not surprisingly it is also one of the most polluted cities in China, if not the
in the world. Black, sooty dusts hangs in the air.

Xinjiang has an estimated 2.2 trillion tons of coal reserves. 40 percent of China’s total.
The Junggar Basin in northern Xinjiang contains the largest coal reserves in China, with
more 300 billion tons of ore.

The Wude coal field in Inner Mongolia is one of China’s largest coal fields, extending
over an area of 15 square miles. There, trucks carry loads from the open pit mines.
Scavengers in donkey carts pick up pieces of coal that bounce off the trucks. The air is
filled with black dust and acrid sulfur dioxide fumes from the coal fires that burn below
the surface.

China’s rich anthracite reserves stretch across a 3,000-mile-long belt at depths up to 250
feet. Even so domestic supply is not enough. China imports large amounts of coal from
Australia and other countries. In Newcastle, Australia—the world’s largest coal port—
dozens of ships waiting in line for up to two weeks at time to carry coal back to China

Coal was selling $38 a ton in 2005, up from $8.50 in 2000. The price doubled in 2003.
Coal demand is expected to drop somewhat as the Three Gorges dam and five new
nuclear power plants begin generating electricity in the mid 2000s. In Inner Mongolia, a
$2 billion plant is being constructed that turns coal into gasoline.
 China Shenhua is China’s largest coal producer. It’s production in 2006 was 150.5
metric tons, a 12.5 percent increase from the previous years, and is sales was 171.1
million metric tons, an 18.5 percent increase from the previous year. China Coal Energy
is China’s second largest coal producer by revenue. Yanzhou Coal is another large coal
company.

Transporting Coal in China

Bring coal to homes One of the biggest challenges in China is moving coal from inland
production areas to power stations and industries in the coastal regions. Most of it is
moved by train. Sometimes there is so much coal to be moved there is danger of
overwhelming the transportation system. The rail system devotes 40 percent of its
capacity to moving coal but still can’t keep up with demand or supply enough railway
cars to transport the coal. Bottlenecks in coal transportation have contributed to energy
shortages.

China’s largest coal deposits are in the north and west while most of its industry is in the
south or along the coast in the east. Transporting the million s of tons of coal needed to
keep China’s factories and power plants humming is struggle which strains the rail
system and is vulnerable to bad weather. When severe blizzards struck in the winter of
2009, supplies were cut off, reserves dwindled and electricity was rationed in 17
provinces. Even with energy conservation measures in place there were severe electricity
shortages in the Guangdong area.

Large amounts of coal produced around Datong are moved by rail to the northeast
coastal port of Qinghuangdao and then moved by ship to industrial areas in the coastal
province of Fujian and Guangdong. The rail line carries about 200 million metric tons a
year. Another important rail line links the city of Houma in Shanxi to the ports of Rizhao
and Qingdao in Shandong province and Lianyungang in Jiangsu Province.

Mines produce mountains of coal. The roads used by coal trucks are covered in black
dust. In some places coal is delivered by trucks straight from mines to people’s homes.
 Coal prices rose to $53.29 a metric ton in May 2007 in part because of a backlog of
ships waiting for coal at the coal station at Newcastle, Australia, with many of is the ships
waiting to pick up coal to take to China.

Export taxes on coking coal were raised to prevent coal needed at home to prevent
power shortages from being exported.

Coal and the Environment in China

It is estimated that the use of cheap coal cost China $248 billion, the equivalent of 7.1
percent of GDP, in 2007 through environmental damage, strains on the health care
system and manipulation of commodity prices. The figure was arrived at by the Energy
Foundation and the WWF by taking into consideration things like lost income from those
sickened by coal pollution.

Coal has been tied to a number of health problems. In towns like Gaojiagao in Shanxi it
has been linked with a high number of birth defects such neural tube defects, additional
fingers and toes, cleft pallets and congenital heart disease and mental retardation.

See Air Pollution, Global Warming, Environment. Nature

Coal Mines

China employs more than

6 million people in the coal business. The massive state mines are like small cities. They
have shops, clinics and dormitories. Much of their operations are mechanized. Better
mines take measures to protect against accidents, require miners to take safety courses,
and have closed circuit video cameras in the shafts. In run down mines miners live
dormitories in which they are sometimes forced to sleep in the same bed and do much of
the work by hand in very unsafe conditions.

The state mines provide pension and health care for workers. In many cases providing
these benefits have made them unprofitable, Many are struggling to make ends meet.
Many have gone bankrupt; hundreds of thousands of miners have lost their jobs. In the
mining town of Yangjiazhangzi (250 miles northeast of Beijing) more than 20,000 miners
and their families, angered by the loss of their jobs and corruption, battled with police
and soldiers.

Many miners work at small, unsafe and unlicensed private mines that are notorious for
ignoring safety regulations and producing fatalities and serious injuries. These mines are
usually run by private entrepreneurs, who sometimes subcontract facilities developed by
the government. One agency counted 65,313 illegal mines in 2006.

Small unlicenced coal nines produce about a third of China’s coal but are responsible for
three quarters of all mine-related deaths. Many of these mines lack ventilators and basic
safety equipment. Gas explosions and flooding are common. The government blames
mine owners and mining companies that turn a “a deaf ear to safety regulations and
management processes.” Labor leaders blame market reforms which put an emphasis on
profits over safety.

One official told the Washington Post, “Local governments, because of their own
interest and profit motives, secretly tolerate these dangerous coal mines. Now, its more
severe because of the shortages. There is even more incentive to tolerate danger because
th price has gone up.” Some think if anything the situation might get worse as dwindle
supples driver miners deeper into the earth.

Coal Miners in China

Miners generally make around $172 a month but sometimes earn as little as $70 a
month. They have little labor representation, health benefits or legal protection. If they
get injured they have to pay for their treatment out of their own pockets. If they die their
families receive little compensation.

Miners in state-owned mines typically leave for work at 3:00am and return home at
5:00pm covered in a layer of black grit. Days off are few and far between, sometimes
only twice a month, even at legal mines. “I really feel like were are slaves,” one miner
told is the Washington Post.

Many miners work six or seven days a week in eight-hour shifts, with no break for
meals. Each is paid according to how many carts he fills. After room and board and other
expenses are subtracted the miners can save or send home the equivalent of a few dollars
a month.

Coal miners often earn so little they scavenge hill-size slap heaps for usable chunks of
coal to heat their own homes, eat meat only twice a year and subsist on a diet of cabbage,
corn gruel and potatoes. They often work in mines owned by owners who live in villas
and drive in new black Audis.

Despite the poor working conditions and low pay, many Chinese are anxious to do the
work because they have few other ways of making money. Many miners plan to work for
several years and save enough to buy some more land or animals. Most miners are
migrants. Many are impoverished farmers or laid off workers from distant provinces who
are desperate for work. Often several family members work in the same mine.

Mine owners in Shanxi are notorious for their greed and flashiness. Newspapers keep
track of how many Hummers, Ferraris and Rolls-Royces they drive and how many luxury
condominiums in Beijing and Shanghai they possess. Their wealth is especially obvious
because they operate in some of China’s poorest provinces. Many mines are operated by
relatives of government officials.

Coal Miners at Work in China

Miners typically wear a yellow safety helmet and a miners lamp and have coal dust
imbedded in their forehead lines and dust in their ears. Some work in tunnels that are so
low they have to crouch when working and crawl or duck walk when moving through the
tunnels. Some wear what amounts to loincloths because the mines are so hot and drag
buckets of coal that weigh as much as the miners through the shafts by hand. The only
light comes from lamps on the miner’s head. In some cases the lamps are nothing more
than candles, whose flames are extremely dangerous when gas fumes are present.

Describing work done at an unlicenced mine near Datong, Erik Eckholm wrote in the
New York Times, "Men wearing head lamps climb down crude shafts, where they use
picks and crowbars to pry loose chunks of coal...With shovels and by hand, they heap the
coal onto metal carts that are jerked through long corridors to open air. Finally is loaded
onto trucks for eventual sale throughout China and abroad."

Describing a coal miner at worker in a mine around Pingdingshan on Henan Province,

Jane MacArtney wrote in the Times of London, “Mr. Zang...climbs into a metal pulley
lift and starts a 100m journey down ...Water drips down the walls. The only light is from
a lamp on his plastic helmet. Mr. Zang, wearing rubber boots and a blue cotton jumpsuit,
makes his way under the logs and branches that support the tunnel. He follows the narrow
rail track for the coal cars, ducking his head to avoid a broken support or dip in the
ceiling.”

“The wine of drills at the coal-face grows louder. But first Mr. Zang has to stop to help
two other miners as they use brute force and a log to a lever a derailed coal truck back on
the track....On the surface, a miner heaves a truck off the pulley lift, pushes it by hand
along the rails and empties its load down the side of a coal heap. A bulldozer and two
men with shovels then fill a lorry that will take the coal for processing.”

The documentary Yuam Shan (“Distant Mountain”) by film maker Hu Jie in the 1990s
showed the horrid conditions that miners worker under.
Sinking land in Shanxi

Coal and Subsiding Villages in China

Coal mining produces all kinds of problems. In Da Antou, a village that sits on the
slopes of a coal-filled mountain In Shanxi Province, houses are breaking apart and falling
into the ground because the mountain it sits on has been hollowed out by coal mining.

Almost every house in the village has some cracks. Some residents have been woken up
in the middle of the might as their windows shattered apart and cracks—some several
inches wide—spread across the walls and ceilings. Other have had holes opened in their
roofs, tiles drop on their floosr and bricks topple from vaulted ceilings. Occasionally
entire rooms collapse. The shifting earth has also disrupted water supplies and made
many sources of water unusable.

Many residents have had to abandon their homes out of fear their houses will collapse
on them and their children. The government and the state-owned coal company mining
the mountain have given the village about $350,000 in compensation to help build new
homes. By some estimated 7,700 square miles of Shanxii has been hollowed out by mines
and other areas may have similar problems

In October 2007, 12 people died when five houses crashed into a collapsed mine tunnel
in northern Shanxi Province. Workers had been extending a tunnel under a residential
area in the city of Yangquan. In the initial reports it was unclear whether the dead were in
the tunnel or the houses.