Curbing China’s coal consumption is in many ways the main challenge when it comes to slowing global climate change, but accomplishing that goal has as much to do with the United States as it does with China.
That’s because the U.S., more so than other nations, can put a particular pressure on China to invest more in low-carbon technology and bankroll less coal power in developing countries. The U.S. can also get China to commit to consuming less coal and emitting fewer greenhouse gases, according to global energy analysts, climate researchers, and environmentalists.
That’s, in part, through global economic competition. If the U.S. were to recommit significant dollars toward funding clean energy in the developing world, it would challenge Chinese investments in those nations, much of which to date have been coal-heavy, experts say. Chinese financial institutions and corporations have helped to finance more than a quarter of the coal plants under development in countries outside of China, according to a report last year from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.
The U.S. also has a significant assistance role to play, analysts say. For example, the U.S., as a leader in carbon capture, could push that technology’s cost point down, making that a more attractive option for the Chinese industry.
However, the U.S., the world’s most significant emitter, is doing almost nothing to help China, the world’s largest current emitter, deal with its emissions.
The Trump administration has pulled away from talks with other countries on climate change. It is waging a trade war with China that has undercut both countries’ cooperation on low-carbon energy. U.S. efforts to improve carbon capture and removal technology domestically aren’t moving fast enough amid continued uncertainty over how to implement key tax credits for the technology, a shortfall of federal investment, and a lack of unified national climate policy.
China isn’t likely to curb emissions dramatically on its own, making U.S. commitment the linchpin of global climate cooperation, said John Dean, president of the energy analysis firm JD Energy.
“I’m not sure China really wants to go out on a limb like that,” he said. “They’re much more comfortable, in the absence of anybody really pushing them, to just follow their national interest.”
But this next year is critical for China. The Chinese government is developing its 14th five-year plan for its economy, in which it will signal how quickly the country would be willing to transition away from coal energy.
Already, the government faces pressure from industries in the country to raise a cap it set on coal production in the last five-year plan, a move that energy analysts say would jeopardize China’s ability to ensure that its emissions peak in 2030. That’s what the country promised under the Paris climate agreement.
Even at its peak in 2011, at 318 gigawatts, total U.S. coal power capacity reached less than one-third of China’s giant and growing coal fleet. China currently has more than 3,000 coal power generators in operation, with a total capacity of 980 GW, according to the latest data from the University of Maryland and Chinese government-backed researchers.
For even further comparison, the capacity of the entire U.S. electric grid at the end of 2018 totaled nearly 1,100 GW, according to the Energy Information Administration. That same figure, 1,100 GW, is the cap on coal capacity China is attempting to enforce.
Right now, though, China’s hunger for coal is driving global demand for the high-emitting fossil fuel, and the country’s fleet is expected to decline little over the next five years.
Coal use in China won’t plateau until 2022. In 2024, coal will still power 59% of China’s electric sector, according to recent projections from the International Energy Agency, a global forum for energy collaboration, including 30 countries.
It’s “completely wrong” to say the world is seeing the end of coal, Fatih Birol, head of the IEA, told the Washington Examiner. Birol said global coal consumption had increased by 65% since 2000, and China is the world’s biggest consumer of coal, with almost half the world’s coal used in the country.
“Chinese decisions on coal, or in general, affect the global coal markets,” he said.
Coal is the largest contributor to rising carbon dioxide emissions, which are driving global climate change, Birol added. “So, this is the main issue.”
But while coal consumption is falling fast in the U.S. and the European Union, in large part due to market forces, it’s tough to expect the same sort of rapid changes in Asia, Birol said. And even if China and the world didn’t build a single new coal plant, the existing fleet would still be the number-one source of greenhouse gases in 2050, he added.
To Birol, the solution is carbon capture because it’s the “only technology which can find a breach between the economic development priorities of the emerging Asian countries and climate change.”
The use of carbon capture on coal plants in China, though, is sparse, according to researchers.
Carbon capture is “a controversial topic in China now. It’s expensive, and it’s not ready yet,” said Ryna Cui, an assistant research scholar at the University of Maryland’s Center for Global Sustainability. Cui is a lead author on a recent study mapping a path for China to phase out coal consistent with the Paris Agreement’s more ambitious goal of keeping global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius.
To do so, China shouldn’t build any new coal at all and should rapidly decrease its current consumption, according to the study.
Cui said the study doesn’t project any retrofits of existing coal plants with carbon capture, but it does include some of the technology paired with new construction.
Carbon capture could help bring down emissions in China, though, if it becomes cheaper. And that’s not just in the power sector but also in the energy-hungry manufacturing industry of China and other Asian nations, where there are few alternatives to decarbonize, said Brad Page, CEO of the Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute.
“The rate of construction and the level of emissions that are locked in with those power plants is enough on their own to blow the carbon budget to pieces, even if everything else was decarbonized,” he said. “So CCS on power is important, but CCS in industrial applications is almost the only answer.”
Yet analysts believe that carbon capture technology will remain prohibitively expensive on a large scale without more government assistance.
The U.S., which leads the world in the number of carbon capture projects operating and under construction, according to the Global CCS Institute, is in a position to change that but hasn’t yet moved to do so thanks to reticence from both political parties to commit fully to the policies and financing that would be required to shift the landscape.
In 2018, Congress passed one of the most significant financial incentives for carbon capture in the world to date: the so-called 45Q tax credits. But the Treasury Department has yet to finish rules for how that tax credit should be implemented, keeping potential projects on hold and investors on the sidelines.
Many Republicans appear to be creating a Catch-22, according to Dean. They argue that they don’t want the U.S. to do anything costly or substantial on climate change without other countries such as China pulling their weight, yet the GOP is also unwilling to put in place sufficient financial and policy incentives to drive investments in carbon capture and other low-carbon technologies that they say they want to export to the developing world.
“I just see a disconnect between what a lot of people are saying in terms of our ability to export this technology and, in fact, our ability to develop it,” Dean said. “Frankly, at this point, I basically have concluded nothing short of a massive government-funded program will make a difference.”
Many Democrats, on the other hand, are skeptical of embracing carbon capture because they fear it will extend the life of fossil fuels.
“Renewables are massively important. We’ve got to stop this competition,” Page of Global CCS said. “Some people are competitive about it [being] renewables instead of CCS. That’s not the frame to think about addressing the climate emergency.”
Meanwhile, China doesn’t appear likely to stop constructing coal plants or decrease its emissions, not without significant pressure to do so.
China added 42.9 GW of new net coal capacity between 2018 and June 2019, compared to a decline in capacity by 8.1 GW in the rest of the world, according to a November report from the Global Energy Monitor, a nonprofit organization that tracks fossil fuel development around the world.
The group found that China could be adding nearly 150 GW in additional coal power, or almost as much coal capacity as the entire EU.
China should really be starting to plan for “the phaseout of most, if not all, of its coal plants or retrofitting with carbon capture and storage,” said Christine Shearer, Global Energy Monitor’s director for coal and a lead author on the report.
Shearer said she expects China to begin some coal plant retirements, citing reports that the country has plans to cut capacity at its five biggest utilities. That test program could expand to other utilities in the country, she added, noting that many coal plants in China are losing money because they already aren’t running at full capacity.
Closing down coal plants in China could be a challenge, however, because the fleet is much younger than in the U.S. and Europe. The average age of Chinese coal plants is 11 years, compared to U.S. and European plants that are almost 40 years old and already close to the end of their lifetimes, Birol of IEA said.
And retirements alone won’t be enough to reverse China’s emissions trajectory, Shearer and others say.
“This is a very unprecedented challenge for China,” Cui said. The pace of coal reductions needed to curb China’s emissions “has never really happened in other countries.”
