China, which is rich in coal but poor in petroleum and gas, may
put an end to projects which are designed to produce petroleum by
liquefying coal, an official with the country's top economic
planning agency has said.
The consideration came after evaluation of the nation's limited
energy resources and its ecological environment, a deputy director
of the industry department of the National Development and Reform
Commission (NDRC) told a seminar on China's fuel ethanol
development, held in Beijing on Saturday.
"Liquefied coal projects consume a lot of energy, though the
successful industrialization of liquefied coal could help reduce
the country's dependence on petroleum," said the official who
declined to be named.
The Chinese government said earlier it would invest more in
developing alternative energy resources including biomass fuel and
liquefied coal to substitute petroleum during the 11th Five-Year
Plan (2006-10) period, amid concerns over the country's growing
dependence on petroleum.
China, the world's second-largest energy consumer, imported
162.87 million tons of oil in 2006, driving the country's reliance
on imported oil up 4.1 percentage points from a year earlier to
reach 47 percent, official statistics show.
The country is also confronted with huge capital demand and
higher consumption of water and coal in producing the liquefied
coal, the official said.
A project in north China's Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region with
a designed capacity of 1.08 million tons would need more than 50
billion yuan (US$6.58 billion) of investment, according to him.
He said the country had begun the coal-liquefying projects
without trial industrialization operation, and the technologies
involved were not sophisticated yet.
And both coal and petroleum are irreproducible energy resources,
he said.
However, the country has never slackened its efforts to find
substitutes for petroleum.
China said on Tuesday it has successfully excavated combustible
ice--a kind of natural gas hydrate--from below the floor of the
South China Sea after nine years of research in this field.
The Chinese government said recently it upheld the development
of renewable resources as an important national strategy, and would
continue to boost the development of hydro power, solar power, wind
power, biomass fuel and methane.
The current seminar was hosted by Chinese Academy of Engineering
with sponsorship from Denmark-based Novozymes, the world's leader
in enzymes and microorganisms. Discussions focus on the
industrialization of China's fuel ethanol.
(Xinhua News Agency June 11, 2007)