China’s Top Coal Region Expands to Prevent Another Power Crunch
China’s biggest coal-mining region will shoulder much of the increases in capacity demanded by the government to forestall another national power crisis. The northern province of Shanxi has pledged to add 107 million tons this year, over a third of the country’s target, which will push its annual total to 1.3 billion tons, the local government said in a statement on Wednesday. A smaller increase of 50 million tons will follow in 2023.
China’s domestic haul of the fuel hit an all-time high last year of over 4 billion tons, but more has been deemed necessary to prevent a repeat of the power shortages that crippled the economy in the fall. The surge in energy prices due to the war in Ukraine is entrenching the importance of fossil fuels across the world, and Chinese Vice Premier Han Zheng used a speech in the province’s capital on Wednesday to extol coal’s role in powering China’s economy and to promise to keep prices stable. To that end, the government has said it wants to raise capacity by another 300 million tons, putting the spotlight on the top three mining areas — Shanxi, Inner Mongolia and Shaanxi — just as air-conditioning demand peaks and industry emerges from the worst of the recent virus outbreaks. After just one month of peak summer demand, power generation has already hit a record in some places.
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