The Coal Trap

It isn't the Great Wall or the Three Gorges Dam, but the launch last month of China's most robust--and efficient--coal-fired power plant was hailed as a critical feat. Make that "ultra-supercritical": that's the name for the technology behind the next-generation 1,000-megawatt electricity plant located near the city of Wenzhou, in bustling, coastal Zhejiang Province. The $2.3 billion plant, which abuts the East China Sea, employs energy-saving "clean coal" technology. Because its hulking boilers can heat steam to 600 degrees Celsius--well beyond the "critical" boiling point--the plant needs 17 percent less coal than an average Chinese power plant to produce a kilowatt hour of electricity.

Officials at the state power giant Huaneng, which owns the plant, also boast that the facility sets new standards for pollution control. They say it will reduce carbon dioxide emissions (the major cause of global warming) by roughly 14 percent and almost completely eliminate sulfur dioxide discharges that pollute the air. China's five state energy giants are building roughly 10 additonal ultra-supercritical plants similar to the Wenzhou facility. "China has to go down this road," plant manager Li Jianmin told NEWSWEEK, "to reconcile our demand for power and development with the pressure [to protect] our resources and environment. This will be a big improvement."

Nothing in China needs improvement more urgently than the aging and coal-dependent energy industry. Coal is the world's cheapest and dirtiest energy source, and China has 1 trillion tons of proven reserves; only the United States and Russia have more. Such an ample supply has been serendipitous in a country where the demand for electricity has risen by 60 percent since 2000. China now accounts for one third of global coal consumption, devouring 2.2 billion tons last year to generate 80 percent of its electricity and 75 percent of its home heating. China's heavy industry would be lightweight without coal.

But like 19th-century England or the Soviet Union in its industrial heyday, China is seeing coal-driven growth turn ugly. As in India, another economic comer with power problems, China has been growing so fast, for so long, that the central government has lost control of the energy industry. Nearly half the coal plants built in China between 2001 and 2005 were small, old-fashioned models erected by local officials, often without Beijing's full approval. President Hu Jintao and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao are trying to change that. They've made energy efficiency a national priority--and the central government will spend hundreds of billions over the next 20 years building nuclear plants and developing renewable-energy platforms such as solar forests, wind farms, biomass fuels, not to mention qingjie meitan , or clean-coal technology.

Both Hu and Wen tout "sustainable" and "scientific" development as the key to curtailing the social costs of unfettered growth. But Beijing's effort to clean up and control the coal economy will take decades to produce results, and meanwhile China is courting a catastrophe that could impair the health of its people. The dilemma is ironic. If Hu and Wen succeed, China will become a cleaner country--but the transition will also help slow down the growth of a manufacturing juggernaut that has helped bring millions of Chinese out of poverty and drive down the cost of everything from toys to TVs worldwide. If the leaders fail, China's environmental problems will get worse.

China is already enveloped in a toxic cloud that's visible from space. Virtually every day in December, Beijing looked like a film negative of itself--spectral and acidic. And coal emissions do not respect borders. Sulfur dioxide discharges from China are being blown across the Pacific, causing acid rain in South Korea, Canada and Europe. Experts say that sulfur dioxide emissions from coal combustion (25 billion tons in 2005, tops worldwide) kill about 400,000 Chinese prematurely annually. "Cleaning up the coal industry must be the No. 1 task," says Yang Fuqiang, chief Beijing representative to the Energy Foundation, an American NGO. "Otherwise, its impact on the land, the environment, the people and the economy will make it very hard for the country to sustain itself."