Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
of coal-
red power plants, which is approximately 40 percent of thermal power plant
capacity in China (Zeng, 2007). The government has issued strong targets for energy
e
fi
ciency and renewable energy, although its progress toward meeting these goals has been
uneven. China has issued six main environmental laws and nine natural resources laws,
though, again, enforcement of these laws is inconsistent. The State Council has released
28 environmental administrative regulations, and SEPA has published 27 environmental
standards. Reportedly, more than 900 local environmental rules have been promulgated
as well (Liu, 2007). The Chinese government issued its
ciency standards for
automobiles in 2005, and they were strengthened in 2008. China now leads the world in
total installed renewable energy capacity at 42 GW, largely due to its widespread deploy-
ment of solar thermal technology. In 2005, China passed a renewable energy law that
requires grid operators to purchase electricity from renewable generators and it set a target
of 10 percent of electric power generation coming from renewable energy sources by 2010,
not including large hydropower (Gallagher, 2007).
In China's big cities, most of the urban air pollution comes from motor vehicles. The
car population in China has grown dramatically, going from less than 100 000 total in
1990 to approximately 25 million in 2007. All the new cars on the road are causing oil
imports to rise, and China is now the second-largest consumer of oil in the world and the
third-largest oil importer. By 2000, total Chinese automobile oil consumption equaled
total oil imports at 1.2 million barrels per day (Xu, 2002). Although the growth in new
cars has been astounding, the total number is still small compared with the situation in
the USA, which has a car and sport utility vehicle (SUV) population of 230 million. With
20 percent of the world's population, the Chinese own only 1.5% of the cars in the world
(Davis and Diegel, 2007).
The Chinese government has imposed four kinds of environmental regulations on pas-
senger vehicles in China: tailpipe pollution control standards, fuel quality standards, fuel-
e
fi
rst fuel e
ciency standards, and a system of administrative fees based on engine size. The
fi
rst
pollution control standards took e
ect in the year 2000, and at that time China adopted
the European system for pollution control, imposing the Euro 1 standard. This standard
was very weak in comparison with other industrialized countries at the time. In 2004,
China tightened the pollution control standards to the Euro 2 level, and then moved to
Euro 3 levels in 2007. Fuel quality standards have lagged behind, and this has proved to
be a major obstacle for reducing tailpipe emissions in China because, with high-sulfur
fuels, it is impossible to achieve low emissions since the fuels erode the pollution-reduc-
ing catalytic converters. The
ff
rst fuel quality standards were also imposed in 2000, and
tightened in 2005. But policy towards improving fuel quality has stagnated due to the
Chinese government's unwillingness to require its re
fi
ners to install expensive desulfur-
ization equipment. As in the USA, some of the big cities have moved beyond the national
standards and imposed more stringent standards themselves, Beijing and Shanghai
among them. These cities are requiring low-sulfur fuel, which in turn forces the re
fi
fi
ners
to import more expensive sweet crude.
As the price of oil increased and China became a net oil importer, the Chinese govern-
ment got serious about reducing demand for oil, which has many co-bene
fi
ts in terms of
reduced air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. China issued its
ciency
standards for vehicles in 2005, and they were tightened at the beginning of 2008 in the
second phase. In addition, the government created a system to impose higher taxes on
fi
rst fuel-e
