China doubles down on coal with rapid roll-out of new railway track to the world’s largest deposit
- 257km line from Zhundong open pit to Urumqi will increase the mine’s transport capacity to more than 100 million tonnes a year
- Tight construction deadline and obstacles such as protecting wildlife habitats and extreme Gobi Desert temperatures proved challenging for the team
To the northeast of Xinjiang’s capital city Urumqi, the Zhundong open-pit field has 390 billion tonnes of coal, according to a report on Tuesday by Science and Technology Daily, an official paper run by the Ministry of Science and Technology.
This estimated reserve dwarfs that of the North Antelope Rochelle mine in the United States, once the biggest coal mine in the world, by over 200 times.
The 257km (153-mile) track from Zhundong to Urumqi – about the distance between New York State and Washington DC – would increase the mine’s outgoing rail transport capacity by over 90 per cent to more than 100 million tonnes a year.
Rail engineers told Science and Technology Daily they had encountered many challenges in building the new electricity-powered track against an extremely tight deadline.
“[But] after the completion of this project, the blockage problem that has troubled the railway for many years has been completely eliminated, and the transport channel capacity has been greatly improved,” Huang Jian, deputy director of the freight department of China Railway Urumqi Bureau Group Corporation, was quoted by the state newspaper as saying.
“It is a fundamental change for us to efficiently organise the supply of goods and better serve the production of enterprises along the line.”
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The central government plans turning Zhundong into the largest coal-based energy and chemical production facility in the world.
In the National Xinjiang Zhundong Economic-Technological Development Park, which is about the size of Kuwait, more than 1,200 power stations and factories have been set up in recent years, according to a report by Beijing-based newspaper Guangming Daily in June.
The coal-fired power plants produced nearly 300 gigawatt hours of electricity per day – equivalent to the energy produced by more than a dozen large nuclear reactors – from the Gobi Desert to eastern China via the world’s longest and most powerful ultra-high voltage power line over 3,200km.
The report said many production lines in new chemical plants there operated with few workers because robots had replaced humans in turning coal into high-value chemical products.
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When the first rail to the coal mine was built in 2009, the annual cargo capacity was capped at 15 million tonnes.
In recent years, because of rapidly increasing demand for coal from power plants and factories along the line, the old single-track railway between Zhundong and Urumqi has been operating with an overload more than three times the designed capacity, according to the local authorities.
Expanding the railway to a double-track system was proposed as early as 2015, but the government greenlit the project only last year.
Zhao Feng, an engineer with the China Railway 21st Bureau Group No 4 Engineering Company who took part in the construction of the new track, said in a paper published last month the deadline was demanding for the team.
The new seamless track, for instance, could only be laid in the early morning or late afternoon because of the huge difference in temperatures in the Gobi Desert, an issue that also prompted the team to develop new techniques and plant monitoring devices to stop the rail being squeezed or torn apart by the temperature stress.
The team also worked to minimise habitat disturbance for the many wildlife species living along the line, including the jerboa, trot lizard, lark, antelope, Mongolian wild ass, sand fox, wolf and hare, according to Science and Technology Daily.
“Among them, the Mongolian wild ass, goose-throated antelope, wolf and sand fox are national protected animals,” said the report.
To minimise disruption for animals and their habitats, 24 bridges were built to create wildlife passages, adding another obstacle on the way to the team’s one-year deadline, according to the report.
01:42
China increases coal production to ensure winter supplies, easing energy shortage
Energy production and use are crucial to China’s goal of becoming carbon neutral before 2060.
Even as it builds wind and solar farms at a pace faster than any country, the government has recently stressed the importance of maintaining, or even increasing, coal production, which currently meets about 60 per cent of the nation’s energy needs, as a safety measure against the global energy crisis and extreme weather.
An unprecedented drought hit China’s water-rich southern regions this summer, reducing the output of hydropower plants while the demand for electricity soared because of the heat.
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China produces a third of the electricity in the world. Its power generation in July rose 4.5 per cent from a year earlier to meet the increasing demand, according to official data.
From January to July, coal production in China was 12 per cent higher than a year earlier at 2.56 billion tonnes.
