New 1,000km Rail Line for Coal Transport from Inner Mongolia
27 November 2008
China Daily. Next year, the Inner Mongolia autonomous region will start the construction of a 1,000-km (621-mile) rail line to transport coal to ease the country’s coal transportation bottlenecks. The new line is expected to transport 200 million tons of coal annually; the project is in line with the government’s policy to boost domestic demand.
Inner Mongolia will invest over 170 billion yuan [US$24.9 billion] in building railways by the year 2013, and the total length of the railways will increase to over 13,000 km from the present 6,800 km, said Xu Jing, who oversees railway projects in the local development and reform commission. Rail lines for coal transportation will account for an important part of the project, he said.
At present, Inner Mongolia is still facing coal transportation bottlenecks. Currently only 150 million tons of coal can be transported out from the autonomous region. This year the total coal output from the region is expected to surpass 400 million tons. Transportation bottlenecks are often seen as major impediments to the development of China’s coal industry.
I'm conflicted:
Coal is dirty, and very cheap, which makes it a very affordable pollution source. It is energy intensive to mine and transport. However, without coal, we would begin to delve deeper into oil shale and bituminous oil sands, which are even dirtier.
Is this good, or bad? You decide.
Posted by: Bike Commuter Dude | 27 November 2008 at 12:35 PM
What no quotes in the China Daily news from Harry Reid or other wing nuts about AGW.
Surly the environment of Mongolia has got to be a 'sensitive' as Utah.
American journalists are such useful idiots. This is being kind, I am sure that some at the NYT are out and out communists. I was reading an energy story very critical of the US. The story was full of factual errors of geography and repeated in US papers. I traced the origins to he China Daily news.
When my son was little, he got a toy race car as a gift. I was looking at the package and it was made in China. The background of the package was a map. Being a race car I thought the map would be Indy or Charlotte. No it was a map of Hanford. Why would a Chinese toy manufacture have a map of our top secret nuclear weapons facility?
I do not have a problem with China acting in it self interest. It would benefit the people of China if they used coal as clean and efficient as my utility does. Not one power plants in China comes to close to being as good as the oldest of the coal plants that make my electricity.
We have leaders like Harry Reid who are will to destroy our economy while ignoring that the US is a leader in reducing ghg when it is measured in terms of gCO2eq per MWh or ton of steel.
Posted by: Kit P | 27 November 2008 at 12:56 PM
If they previously used trucks, the up side of this is less GHG produced to get the coal to the power plants.
Posted by: GdB | 27 November 2008 at 01:31 PM
The one good point here is that the expanded rail access will let more wind turbine parts be transported into Mongolia.
Posted by: John Taylor | 27 November 2008 at 06:11 PM
The US has had thirty years to show China how to standardise and build nuclear power plants quickly and cheaply. The black air is much more dangerous to the population than high levels of CO2. Since there are no laws about CO2 in the US, many cults have sprung up to claim to know what fuels are dirty. CO2 that many drink and all breath every day seems to be the major attribute of "dirty fuel" because most have never seen coal burned in an open grate. There are known ways of burning coal with zero releases of CO2 and other materials into the air. The burning of coal in a new US power plant is much cleaner and more efficient in all aspects than the operation of a SUV. There is also the forgotten factor that the refinery uses 123 gallons of crude to make 100 gallons of fuel; that is 23 gallons are totally used up in refining.
It must be commented that it is amusing that the Chinese gave up on manufacturing and putting new coal burning locomotives into service just ten years or so before they could be used to move massive amounts of coal. They could have been relatively clean with the Porta producer gas combustion system and cheap to run with his boiler water treatment. ..HG..
Posted by: Henry Gibson | 06 December 2008 at 02:26 AM