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China’s carbon emissions set for structural decline from next year | Energy industry | The Guardian
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2023
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Well, yes. The simple facts we have are that fossil fuel use is up. What happens next year will be speculation, but what we know is that they are using more coal this year, and they are hedging their future bets by building out their coal generation capacity. So if climate change means a further drop in hydro output, or more cloud cover where they install solar, or they need to make more power than they're installing because the world wants more steel (I'm in the building industry and steel supply is still a bit tight) - they can start belching out a massive amount of CO2.
Only time will tell - and I hope you turn out to be the one who is right :-)
China building out future coal capacity is more or less independent from expected future coal consumption.
That sounds like a crazy claim, so let me clarify: China is actively shrinking coal power plant utilization. The only reason, then, to build more capacity is to better manage peak loads. If you were following the rolling blackouts, you'd know that these are a huge problem in China in the summers.
So... Yeah, the first-order data itself isn't great, but the second-order data tells us that coal isn't a first class citizen anymore.
My only reason to believe that is not what is happening is that China, and the Chinese, are too smart to using coal as a peaking or emergency source of power. The only thing worse than coal for peaking is nuclear. Oil, Gas, and hydro are all much better for short-to-mid term peaking and batteries - something they're very good at and have vast resources for - are perfect for short term emergency/failover loads. I believe (without documentation) that they are building extra capacity for the possibility of another expansion - the incubation of so many "third world" economies and partnerships across Asia and Africa to spur demand for their domestic production. If they don't use it, it was a jobs program; if they find they need it, they will accept short term cash and economic power for a worsening of the world environment. In a way, the largest communist country on earth is also the largest capitalist power. Ironic.
China doesn't have much domestic O&G supply and nuclear reactors are so expensive they might as well use them for base load. You play the hand you're dealt.