China beats US with power from coal-processing to trap carbon

After studying chemistry at Shanghai’s Fudan University, Jane Chuan and Wang Youqi pursued doctorates in the U.S. She got hers from what’s now the University of Buffalo in 1988, the year they married. Wang graduated in 1994 from the California Institute of Technology.

A few years later, they were cashing in stock options in Silicon Valley companies they’d co-founded. Their home in Atherton, California, had seven bedrooms, 11 bathrooms and an acre of land, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its May issue.

By 2000, Wang was convinced that the research methods he was patenting could help stave off the environmental nightmare he saw unfolding during return visits to his homeland. China, already reeling from pollution, was poised to more than double coal consumption during the decade. That would choke cities with smog and exacerbate global warming.

Chuan, 61, remembers pitching U.S. investors on cleaning China’s coal. Only a handful of California’s Internet-obsessed venture capitalists bit, she says.

So, in 2003, the couple moved back to Shanghai. By 2006, Wang had his breakthrough in sight. He’d found a way to unlock a chemical stored in the coal that was poisoning his country and to put it to an unlikely use: cleaning China’s air.

The catalyst he discovered speeds reactions that convert methanol extracted from coal into a substance called dimethyl carbonate that Yashentech produces for $730 a ton, or 36 percent less than rivals. By adding dimethyl carbonate to diesel fuel, Wang now plans to cut 90 percent of black carbon soot from the tailpipe emissions of 1,800 Shanghai buses by year-end.

“We said, Let’s go to China, where we can leverage brainpower that’s cheaper and do something important for mankind,” says Wang, 55, taking a break to greet visitors at Yashentech Corp., the couple’s Shanghai-based company.

Yashentech’s emissions-busting effort is one way in which China is racing to solve its clean-energy riddle: How can a country that’s hooked on coal mitigate environmental damage from the dirtiest of fossil fuels?

China passed the U.S. as the top carbon polluter in 2007; it now emits more than the U.S. and India combined, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Yet with 1.3 billion people, power-hungry industries and scant oil or natural gas, it has no immediate alternatives to coal for fueling its economy. China gets 70 percent of its energy from coal, three times the U.S. figure. It even converts coal into diesel fuel and ammonia. By 2025, China’s share of global carbon pollution will jump to 30.3 percent from 26.8 percent this year, the EIA says.

China can’t quit coal. But with efforts from entrepreneurs, mining enterprises and electricity giants, it’s ready to tackle its addiction, says Zhou Fengqi, senior adviser to the Energy Research Institute of the government’s National Development and Reform Commission.

“Now that people have meat and fish to eat every day, the environment has also become a big concern,” Zhou says. “China is not like a developed country. We can’t simply stop using coal. If we want to use it, we have to clean it up.”

Scientists say China must act now. The world has just two or three decades to avoid irreversible climate change, says Kelly Sims Gallagher, an energy professor at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts.

“If the Chinese don’t dramatically reduce carbon emissions from coal, there’s no way we can make a dent in climate change globally in the time period that matters,” Gallagher says.

China’s efforts to tackle carbon pollution extend from labs such as Yashentech’s to a windswept hill in the northern desert, where Shenhua Group Corp. is conducting China’s biggest experiment in burying CO2 and studying whether to pump it into oil wells to boost output.

Meanwhile, in a fishy-smelling lab in Langfang, ENN Energy Holdings Ltd. feeds carbon dioxide to microalgae. The company is eventually planning to get the organisms’ CO2 breakfast from its Inner Mongolia coal-to-methanol plant. In return, the algae yield oil for biofuels and omega-3 fatty acids.

“The Chinese are deploying some of these decarbonizing technologies more aggressively than anyone,” says Chris Hartshorn, vice president of Boston-based Lux Research Inc. “They have the money, and their system for investing simultaneously in research, technology and market adoption should be the envy of the world.”

China is underpinning its cleanup by boosting the efficiency of coal-burning plants. Turbines from Shanghai Electric Group Co. require less carbon-spewing rock to begin with. China Huaneng Group Corp. is designing its GreenGen plant in Tianjin to wring more power from coal while capturing sulfur and carbon emissions.

Environmentalists say efforts to improve coal power are shortsighted because they divert attention and money from renewable energy. “Coal is the biggest part of our carbon problem, and we’re fighting to keep it underground,” says Bruce Nilles, deputy conservation director of Sierra Club.

Yashentech’s Chuan and Wang say China will need to burn coal far into the future, creating clean-up opportunities. Wang hopes that in 10 years, vehicles across China will run on sootless diesel, trimming carbon emissions 3 percent. That alone won’t stop global warming. But Wang says it will hearten pollution-weary Chinese when they don’t get blasted by foul bus exhaust.

China may never kick its coal habit. But with entrepreneurs such as Chuan and Wang, companies curbing pollution and government making it imperative to do so, it’s stepping forward to tame a dirty fuel the world still can’t live without.

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