(Beijing) – Chinese leaders looking for a new way to breathe easier plan to prohibit the use of high_sulfur coal for home heating among farmers and poor families in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei Province region.
Local officials in these neighboring jurisdictions, which together form a chronically smoggy region about the size of the U.S. state of Minnesota, plan to bar small_scale use of high_sulfur coal by December 31, 2017, according to local officials. The prohibition is likely to affect some 600,000 households in the capital alone.
Beijing plans to eliminate all coal burning in most of the city by 2017, and help affected households install electric heaters or other forms of low- or no_emissions heating by 2020. Meanwhile, the Hebei government said it wants 90 percent of the province's household heating to rely on high-quality, low_emissions coal by 2017. Tianjin has also mapped out plans gradually phase out low-quality coal.
Officials have been working on restrictions in step with orders from Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli. Speaking at a central government meeting January 4, Zhang told local governments nationwide to cut wintertime emissions from heaters and stoves that burn coal with high sulfur content.
Zhang's directive laid the groundwork for goals set in a "government work report" delivered by Premier Li Keqiang to the National People's Congress in March. Li said the country plans to guarantee "good or excellent" air quality "for 80 percent of the year" in 335 cities across the country within five years.
Beijing's air quality was rated "good" for only half of 2015, according to the capital's environmental protection bureau. And the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region was especially smoggy through the winter of 2015-16 – a phenomenon that some environmental experts blamed on coal heaters in older "ping fang," or one_story, homes common in the region's rural villages and poor urban neighborhoods.
A recent analysis of Beijing's air pollution by Peng Yingdeng, a researcher at the Urban Environmental Pollution Control Technology Research Center, a government_affiliated agency in Beijing, found that emissions from the burning of cheap, low_quality coal contributed to 15 percent of the tiny PM2.5 particulate matter choking the city, as well as 10 percent of the nitrogen oxide and 33 percent of the sulfur dioxide in the air.
Peng's study also pointed fingers at emissions from cars, industries and power plants – well_known sources of air pollution that the government has been working to better control for years with limited success.
Homes and small businesses that burn coal in Beijing_Tianjin_Hebei contribute up to half of the air pollution in the region every winter, said Zhao Yingmin, chief engineer at the Ministry of Environmental Protection. Output from these millions of coal stoves and heaters combine to reach those peaks while consuming about 10 percent, or some 36 million tons, of all coal burned in the region annually, he said. Beijing's consumption alone accounts for some 4 million tons.
Zhao's conclusions are supported by a study by the Chinese Research Academy of Environmental Sciences, a government think tank, released in August that focused on the Hebei city of Baoding, southwest of Beijing. The study said the amount of airborne ash and sulfur dioxide emitted by the coal burners that heat households exceeded similar emissions from the area's industries during the winter of 2013.
The study's authors also concluded that serious hazards associated with low-quality coal burning, especially in rural areas, have been downplayed and neglected for too long.
Costly Subsidies
Peng agreed with the study's findings and Zhao's assessment. And in echoing Peng's view, Zhao said that in spite of the years-long effort to clear the air, the amount of cheap coal burned in rural regions has changed little.
The Beijing government can, nevertheless, take credit for major steps toward controlling air pollution. Peng said city officials nearly halved the amount of locally consumed coal of all kinds between 2012 and last year to 12 million tons.
But the use of low_quality coal by the city's poor has fallen at a relatively slow rate, dropping to 3 million tons last year from 4.3 million tons three years ago.
Accelerating the phase-out of low-quality coal will require replacing old-fashioned stoves with modern heating systems.
Zhi Guorui, an environmental studies professor at the environmental sciences academy, said that eventually the region's rural areas will need new central heating plants powered by low-emissions energy systems. Waste heat from factories could be tapped to warm homes in rural areas and urban areas, said Yang Fuqiang, an advisor to the China branch of the Natural Resources Defense Council.
However, because so many households that now burn coal have limited incomes, experts say generous government subsidies would be needed to buy and install new heaters.
Some government support has already been delivered. Between 2000 and 2015, the Beijing government paid to install electric-heating systems in 300,000 households in central districts, allowing them to break free from coal.
But in Beijing, much more support will be needed to complete the task. The state_owned power distributor for northern China, State Grid, recently estimated the capital would have to spend about 27 billion yuan to provide heating for the 600,000 households that as of March were still burning coal.
To finance new home heating systems, some 9,076 yuan in annual government subsidies would be needed for each ton of coal burned by Beijing's households, according to a 2014 study by the School of Environment and Natural Resources at Renmin University.
And some scholars have called government subsidies only a temporary solution fraught with risks. One potential downside, they argue, is the fact that subsidies can distort market conditions over the long term.
Paying Bills
In addition to subsidizing low- and no_emissions heaters, it's expected governments will have to help householders pay their heating bills. Farmers and low-income families in the Beijing region generally choose low-quality coal heating simply because it's an affordable way to stay warm.
Beijing officials say they're studying a subsidy plan designed to get coal-burning households to switch to efficient electric heat.
The city has subsidized similar switches in the past. But some programs have fared poorly. With government help, households in some central Beijing neighborhoods switched to electric heating from coal in the early 2000s. But the Beijing Evening News reported on January 8 that some of these residents switched back to coal as soon as the subsidies ended.
In Hebei, a provincial government push started in 2013 to encourage the use of low_emissions coal as a replacement for cheap coal has seen limited effects. A Hebei coal trader named Li Yingqiang said many rural households that prefer inexpensive coal have rejected government subsidy offers.
The price gap between coal and electric heat can be huge. In the rural village of Fangezhuang, which is under Beijing's jurisdiction, a reporter for the Jingjiao Daily newspaper recently found a family that spent 4,000 yuan on heating over the past winter after installing electric heaters. The price tag last year, when the family was still burning coal, was less than 2,000 yuan.
Government policies should be changed to better account for potential costs and local conditions, especially in rural areas where electric heat may be unaffordable, said Song Guojun, an environmental studies professor at Renmin University.
Yang suggested government policymakers "first study real conditions in rural areas, instead of making decisions based on their experiences and imaginations."
Any effort that's aimed at completely eliminating small-scale, coal-fired heating systems for homes and shops may be an exercise in frustration, Song said. For that reason, he said, it might be more feasible for the government to pursue other emissions-control projects that, for example, help farmers improve energy efficiency in their homes with insulation.
"It's better to spend money on improving farmers' housing than to invest in heavy subsidies" that simply cover household electric bills, said Song.
Yang agreed that "better heat conservation can reduce energy demand for heating rural homes by half and thus reduce pollution."
Peng is optimistic about the government campaign to ban low_quality coal, but he said officials should commit more money to the campaign and approach the task with patience.
"It will take Hebei at least 10 years to replace coal with clean energy," said Peng, adding that coal currently "accounts for 89 percent of energy consumption" province-wide.
But Song is less hopeful. "I think Beijing's campaign to deal with rural coal burning will never go beyond sloganeering," he said.
(Source:Caixin Online)
