China to massively increase coal consumption and CO2 emissions

China to massively increase coal consumption and CO2 emissions - Plans to use massive new hydropower development to boost China’s power capacity by nearly half by 2015 will not dent coal demand enough to cut greenhouse gas emissions and could further damage the country’s strained river system.

China wants to raise installed power capacity by 490 gigawatts (GW) to 1,440 GW by 2015. At least 140 gigawatts of the new capacity will be from hydro power — equivalent to more than seven Three Gorges hydropower projects and enough to run the whole of France.

The new hydro, along with other sources, is expected to cut coal-fired power from 73 percent of China’s generating capacity to 67 percent and slow the growth of CO2 emissions, which reached 7.5 billion tons in 2009 and are forecast to rise to as high as 12 billion tons by 2030.

But even a stringent pollution-reduction regime would still see China pump out about 9.7 billion tons of CO2 emissions by 2030 as new coal and other fossil plants also come online.

“You’re just playing with the edges,” Hayden Bairstow, an analyst with CLSA in Sydney said, adding that any move away from coal would also be paired with efforts to shut down smaller miners producing lower quality coal, and was likely to lead to more imports. (Reuters)