Beijing — China aims to increase renewable power, maintain crude oil output and boost natural gas production, as it seeks to balance energy security and achieve its climate change goals.
China, the world’s biggest greenhouse gases emitter, has said its carbon emission would peak by 2030, while it has said it would achieve carbon neutrality by 2060.
“We will accelerate the adjustment of the energy structure and promote energy supply security and low-carbon transformation at the same time,” the National Development and Reform Commission said in a statement on Tuesday.
China will keep annual crude oil output at 200 million tonnes, equivalent to 4 million barrels per day, and crank up annual natural gas production to more than 230 billion cubic metres (bcm) by 2025 from 205 bcm in 2021.
It said the country would “actively expand” exploration and development of resources such as shale oil and shale gas and would seek to establish coalbed methane production bases in the Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang and Shanxi regions.
China also planned to achieve gas storage capacity of 55-60 bcm, or 13% of total annual consumption by 2025, and complete a southern extension to the existing China-Russia gas pipeline, the commission said.
Beijing would encourage developing ethanol, biodiesel and bio-jet fuel, provided it did not affect food security, it said.
China suspended a nationwide plan for blending gasoline to have 10% ethanol from 2020 after a sharp fall in the country’s corn stocks and limited production capacity of the biofuel.
China aims to make non-fossil fuels account for about a fifth of total energy consumption by 2025, up from 16% in 2020, and to control coal use in heavy industry including steel, chemical and cement.
About 30 gigawatts (GW) of coal-fired power capacity would be phased out during 2021-2025, while it aimed to raise hydropower capacity to 380 GW and nuclear power capacity to 70 GW by 2025, it said.
China plans to install at least 62 GW capacity of pumped hydropower, a system that involves pumping water to a higher reservoir during off peak times to generate power at peak times.
It also aims turn more than 200 GW of coal-fired power plants to peak-shaving facilities that are used to stabilise the grid operation as the use of intermittent renewable power rises.
China also wants to deploy a batch of hydrogen energy projects, targeting technologies to improve hydrogen storage, transportation, application and fuel cells.
*Muyu Xu & Chen Aizhu; Editing: Kirsten Donovan & Edmund Blair – Reuters
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