Enabling China to shift from coal to natural gas
For the past 30 years, China has tapped coal for about two-thirds of its energy needs, resulting in carbon dioxide and particulate emissions that have significantly degraded the nation’s air quality and impacted the global climate. In an effort to address both concerns and provide a backup fuel for intermittent renewables, China is working to increasingly replace coal with cleaner-burning natural gas. As a first step, the government aims to boost the share of natural gas in its primary energy supply from 6 to 10 percent by 2020 (the current global average is about 25 percent). However, to affect a large-scale transition from coal to natural gas in China will be far more difficult than it has been in the U.S., where the price of natural gas per unit of energy output is much lower than that of coal. In China, the situation is reversed. One approach that’s likely to...