China will make massive City of Los Angeles scale coal bases to consolidate coal processing and keep air pollution from cities but it will put out...

China has announced the closure of more than 1,700 small, inefficient mines in the next year, while planning up to 70 new coal-fired plants, most of them at large coal bases like Ta Shan. In the population centers of the coast, coal is being phased out: coal use in Hebei, the province that surrounds Beijing, will be reduced by half by 2017, the government says.

China is moving its coal operations westward into the interior and away from most of the population on the eastern coast.

To move all that electricity from the interior of the country to the coast, Beijing will invest nearly half a trillion dollars in ultra-high-voltage transmission lines built along west-to-east “power corridors.” Earlier this year the world’s largest UHV line started transmitting electrons from Hami, in Xinjiang Province, more than 1,500 miles east to Shanghai.

So far, 12 of China’s 34 provinces have pledged to implement absolute coal consumption targets, and six have said they will reduce their coal use by 2017, with greater Beijing cutting coal use by 50% in the next 3 years. If successful, these measures could reduce CO2 emissions by 700 million tons (MT) in 2017 and 1,300 MT in 2020

China is erecting huge industrial complexes in remote areas to convert coal to synthetic fuel that could make the air in its megacities cleaner. But the complexes use so much energy that the carbon footprint of the fuel is almost double that of conventional coal and oil.

The facilities, which resemble oil refineries, use coal to make liquid fuels, chemicals, power and “syngas,” which is like natural gas but extracted from coal. The fuels and electricity are then transported to China’s big cities to be burned in power plants, factories and cars.

Currently 16 coal base sites are being built and many are operational. One being constructed in Inner Mongolia will eventually occupy nearly 400 square miles—almost the size of the sprawling city of Los Angeles.

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