Jonathan Watts - When a Billion Chinese Jump

But the industrial-scale experiment at Ordos had already produced a million tons of liquid coal in its first year of operation. It used a direct liquefaction technique to “crack” black carbon with hydrogen extracted from water to produce clear diesel. The demands on resources were immense. For each ton of diesel, six and a half tons of water had to be piped from an aquifer more than 70 kilometers away, and more than three tons of carbon dioxide were released into the air.

For many years, the government hesitated about adopting this technology because the production of liquid coal results in almost twice the emissions as producing a comparable amount of oil. But Shenhua planned to expand production fivefold and to build a similar facility in Xinjiang. In nearby Ningxia, the South African firm Sasol was tying up with a local partner to make an indirect liquefaction facility.

As he showed me the plant, Shu Geping, the chief engineer, said cost and insecurity had prompted China to develop liquid coal as an alternative to imported oil. The coal substitute was competitive when oil hit $40 a barrel. In the future, as technology and economies of scale improve, it will be even cheaper. Ultimately, liquefaction technology was a form of insurance against oil price rises, trade conflict, and embargoes.

“This is strategically important for China because we have abundant coal but little oil,” Shu explained. “I’ve read that if the output of coal-to-liquid plants could reach 50 million tons a year, then China’s energy problems would be solved.”

But it could also completely undermine efforts to put the country on a cleaner growth track. By cheaply filling gas tanks with the world’s dirtiest fuel, liquefaction technology could kill efforts to develop electric cars and other forms of clean transport. If adopted on the massive scale envisaged by Shu, it will extend the life of collieries for decades. The world’s biggest carbon emitter will have found a new way to fill the atmosphere with greenhouse gas.

Shu, though, insisted his facility could be good for the environment because it is equipped to capture and condense carbon dioxide for possible storage. His plant was about to launch one of China’s most ambitious carbon-capture and sequestration projects. In conjunction with a United States partner, it would store 100,000 tons annually in a nearby saline aquifer. That was small beer, less than a thirtieth of the plant’s emissions. It was a pilot project that could be scaled up in the future, but I had heard from several scientists and policymakers how reluctant China was to accept the costs of dumping carbon underground when it was far cheaper to pump it into the air.

Unless such attitudes change, it is likely the carbon storage project will end up as another fine-sounding small step toward a cleaner future while the economy as a whole continues to take giant strides toward heavy, coal-fired industry.

The government is still making up its mind on whether to expand liquefaction. Plans for other facilities that would result in Inner Mongolia converting half of its coal—about 4 percent of China’s total energy resources—into liquid are on hold. In favor is the oil price. Against are environmental concerns and fears of unsustainability. Ordos’s economic growth has been predicated on massively ramped-up consumption of carbon and water. Ordos is surrounded by desert and more prone to drought than Gansu. Up until 2003, water was rationed and residents could use the taps for only three hours a day. Now there are no restrictions because enough water is pumped here from the Yellow River and elsewhere to allow each citizen 130 liters of water per day. 37While the rest of North China endures devastating droughts, rich Ordos is siphoning off more water than ever.

Elsewhere in the city, I examined another very different eco-project that attempted to address criticism that Ordos was wasting scarce resources. The local government had teamed up with the Swedish government and European scientists to build the world’s first dry-latrine multistory housing complex. 38Six hundred families were using toilets that flushed sawdust instead of water. It was a tricky business. The technology was far from perfect and users needed to have a good aim to make it work.

The technique was explained by Chen Furong, a smart young official from the city’s Environmental Protection Bureau who was only occasionally embarrassed by the subject under discussion. In the exhibition center she showed how instead of flushing water the cistern discharged sawdust or wood chips. This covered the waste, which then tipped automatically into a bin in the basement. It was collected once a week and composted for use as fertilizer.

Environmentally, it was brilliant. The apartments in the eco-town used just a third of the water usually required for homes of the same size. Scientists claimed they were the first in the world to mass-compost human waste, which was an efficient use of energy and a good source of potassium, nitrates, and other nutrients for the soil. Professor Jiang in Shandong would have been proud.

But the experiment had a problem: It stank. On some days, the smell was so unbearable that a number of families had moved out. German experts from the World Toilet Organization had been called in for advice. But there was no easy solution.

We visited a group of residents playing cards in a ground-floor apartment. Song Guoying, who lived on the top floor where the smell was worst, felt she was a rat in a toilet laboratory: “When we bought the apartment, the former owners never told us about the special toilets. We just got it because it was cheap. I would never have moved here if I had known about the eco-project. The smell is sometimes so bad I can’t sleep.”

Most of the residents were content, but officials told me privately they did not expect the eco-project to move to a second phase, once the Swedish planners handed control back to the hosts.

Even if the experiment were to succeed, the unflushed savings would be tiny in comparison with the lakes of water being gulped down by mining and the coal liquefication facility a short distance up the road. The small, resource-conserving international project looked like failing while high-emission, resource-consuming industrial complexes were expanding. Ordos encapsulated the contradictions of “Scientific Development.” It was black power, red power, and green power rolled into one. The most successful experiments in Ordos looked great, but they necessitated the consumption of ever more carbon and water. The vision it offered of the future was clean rather than sustainable.

The final full day of my longest journey across China was spent making a 600-kilometer taxi ride through grasslands. The roads were flanked by rolling fields, stretches of barren scrub, and rows of saplings and seedlings. We passed small villages of packed-earth huts daubed with family-planning propaganda and China Mobile adverts. Pulling onto a minor road near Qahar shortly before dusk, we bumped through the most spectacular Mongolian scenery I had seen so far: a broad valley between two knobbled mountain ridges. At the end of a long day, the sun seemed to be in a playful mood, appearing and disappearing behind the peaks like a doting parent playing peekaboo. The twilight lingered for another hour or so, then the stars brightened as we cruised through a sea of grass to our destination—Xanadu.

For three years from 1260, this was the summer capital of the greatest land empire in human history. Kublai Khan held court here in a palatial ger on the grasslands to escape the heat of his adopted home in Beijing. A gourmet and lover of the exotic, the great khan required constant stimulation and entertainment. Wealthier than anyone in the world at that time, he sponsored some of the finest theater in Chinese history and invited Tibetan lamas, Kashmiri magicians, Arabian astrologers, Nestorian Christians, and other great thinkers from his empire to share their philosophies. Poetry of that Yuan dynasty era describes three-day feasts for a thousand guests and dancing girls writhing sensuously in a “heavenly demon dance.” Visitors to Xanadu witnessed the most magnificent and cosmopolitan spectacle of the age. Marco Polo, the Venetian trader, was awestruck: “No man since Adam has ruled over so many subjects or such a vast territory. Nor has any possessed such treasure or such power.” His imagination may have got the better of him. Many historians suspect the Venetian trader never visited Xanadu. 39It was hard to equate any kind of grandeur—real or imagined—with Shangdu, as the disheveled town is now called in Chinese. The small town, which I reached late in the evening, was very much a Han community of orthogonal roads, square white-tiled buildings, tinted windows, pink-lit massage parlors, karaoke bars, and a giant billboard from which Dashan, an enviably fluent Mandarin-speaking Canadian, entreated people to buy mobile phones. The biggest development in the area was a new power plant. The second biggest was the Summer Palace Hotel, where we checked in for the night. It was a giant concrete ger , a modern pleasure dome.