Courtesy of The New York Times, an interesting report on the linkage between China’s coal production to its water shortages:
China’s consumption of coal, a major contributor to climate change and the country’s horrific air pollution, is worsening a severe water shortage in the northern part of the country, Greenpeace said in a reportreleased Tuesday.
China’s coal-fired power plants consume more water where water is scarce than plants in any other country, according to the report, which assessed global water depletion from coal use.
A decades-long drought in northern China — home to the bulk of the country’s coal production and consumption — is worsening, and the central and local governments are grappling with widespread desertification. Officials have relocated millions of people. Beijing, the capital, where more than 20 million people live, has extremely low water levels.
The problem is so severe in the north that China has built an enormous series of canals, the South-North Water Diversion Project, to transport water hundreds of miles from the Yangtze River.
Greenpeace said the continuing burning of coal for power plants and factories in northern China, along with the growth of the coal-to-chemicals industry, was exacerbating the water crisis. In much of northern China, people are using water faster than it can be regenerated, Greenpeace said, “posing a serious threat to local ecology.”
At the end of 2013, China had 45 percent of the world’s coal-fired power plants, with a total installed capacity of 358 gigawatts, according to a summary of findings in the 60-page report, “The Great Water Grab.” Nearly half of the plants were in water-scarce areas, and those had a total annual water consumption of 3.4 billion cubic meters, enough to meet the basic needs of about 186 million people, the researchers found.
Across all of China, coal-fired power plants consume 7.4 billion cubic meters of water each year, enough to meet the needs of 406 million people, or about 30 percent of the nation’s population, according to the report.
Plants proposed for construction would worsen the problem, the report found. Half of those plants, which would have a total installed capacity of 237 gigawatts, would be built in water-scarce areas. They would consume 1.8 billion cubic meters of water, equal to the annual needs of 100 million people, the report said.
“In China, an overlapping of rich coal reserves, water scarcity and fragile ecosystems makes the problem especially pronounced,” Harri Lammi, a Greenpeace senior global campaigner on coal, said in a written statement. “Yet China continues to expand coal power plants in these regions. This must be halted.”
On a global scale, the study found that based on 2013 data, the world’s 8,359 existing coal-fired power plants consumed 19 billion cubic meters of fresh water per year, enough to meet the needs of more than one billion people — one-seventh of the world’s population. Adding in water used for coal extraction and washing, about 23 million cubic meters of fresh water is consumed each year.
Globally, about a quarter of existing and proposed plants are in areas with high water stress, the report said.
For months, Greenpeace has been urging the Chinese government to stop construction of all coal-fired power plants. Greenpeace East Asia, based in Beijing, recently issued an updated report that said Chinese officials last year granted environmental permits for 210 new and proposed coal-fired power plants. The plants would cost about $100 billion to build, and they would worsen the country’s huge overcapacity in coal-fired power plants.
China’s economic growth is slowing, coal use has flattened or dropped in the last two years, and the country’s coal-fired plants are, on average, operating below half-capacity. Chinese representatives of energy sectors other than fossil fuels have criticized the glut of such plants and the proposals to build more.
The burning of industrial coal is the biggest source of air pollution and carbon dioxide emissions, the greatest contributor to climate change. China accounts for half of global coal consumption each year and is the largest emitter of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases; the United States is second.
To fight air pollution in cities, the government has ordered limits on coal use in eastern population centers. The government is establishing 14 large coal “bases” around the country where coal use will be concentrated. Nine of these bases are expected to produce energy for the eastern regions. Three of the bases are in the upper and middle reaches of the Yellow River in northern China, where water is already scarce.
“All of these industries are extremely water-intensive and a high source of water pollution,” the new Greenpeace report said.
China has said it plans to cap annual coal consumption at 4.2 billion metric tons by 2020. The Greenpeace report said that “a more ambitious coal consumption cap would be needed to avoid a deepening water crisis in the driest coal bases of China.”
After China, the top countries with the highest water consumption by coal-fired plants in water-scarce areas were India, the United States, Kazakhstan and Canada. China also tops the list for proposed coal-fired plants in water-scarce areas, followed by India, Turkey, the United States and Kazakhstan.
The Greenpeace report was based on modeling done by a Dutch engineering firm, Witteveen & Bos. Data on existing and proposed coal-fired power plants at the end of 2013 was drawn mainly from Platts World Electric Power Plants Database.
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