China is aiming to produce natural gas of around 50 million tons of coal equivalent (TCE) annually by 2020, a government guideline issued last week from the Ministry of Land and Resources and the National Energy Administration said.
Depending upon its application, gas produces roughly 50-70% of the carbon dioxide emissions from an equivalent coal-fired plant.
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The problem is that every extra tonne of carbon on the allowance allows the burning of an equivalent amount of coal and oil, and that giving way to Russia could open the floodgates to claims from other countries.
During that time, China will add the equivalent of 160 new coal plants while India adds 70.
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That lets operators experiment with different flow rates and carbon-dioxide concentrations, which can be tweaked to be anything from 3.5% to 14% (roughly equivalent to those from a coal-fired power station).
Over the past three years, China has added 200 gigiwatts of coal-fired electric power capacity--equivalent to 20% of the entire installed capacity of the United States.
Fitch Credit Ratings estimates that this is whittling coal sales by about 63 million tons per year, equivalent to 6% of 2010 consumption, with new EPA regulations further reducing sales by another 5%.
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Meanwhile, the energy for everything else--offices, factories, homes and data centers is 85% supplied without oil, and most of it is delivered as kilowatt-hours. (Only a vanishingly 2% of electricity is generated by oil.) Once you connect automobiles to the electric grid, you access a trillion-barrel-of-oil-equivalent energy infrastructure almost entirely fueled by domestic sources: coal, uranium, natural gas and hydro dams.
Every year China is building power-generating capacity almost equivalent to Britain's entire stock, almost all of it burning coal the dirtiest fuel.
The oil-equivalent metric represents all forms of energy consumed, including crude oil, nuclear power, coal, natural gas and renewable sources such as hydropower.
Overall, world energy demand will grow 30% to 2030, from the equivalent of 240 million barrels of oil per day now (including oil, gas, coal, wind, etc.) to 300 million boe.
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