Freezing cities force China to ease anti-smog curbs on coal

Bloomberg

China’s efforts to tackle air pollution are getting a reality check, with some regions told to revert
to burning coal after shortages
of natural gas left people
without heating amid freezing winter temperatures.
Officials in China’s frigid northern provinces were ordered to prioritise keeping citizens warm and areas that hadn’t yet converted fully to gas were permitted to burn coal for heating, media reported, citing a statement from the Ministry of Environmental Protection. Beijing, which reportedly stopped using coal for heating and power in March, asked a plant to restart its coal-fired units because of gas shortages, Caixin magazine said.
The easing of curbs on coal came after some provinces were reported to have suspended heating to households and ordered factories and businesses to curtail power use because there wasn’t enough natural gas.
Reducing the reliance on coal-powered energy is key to China’s push to reduce smog, which can be particularly bad in the north and northeast, home to the rustbelt and cities like Beijing and Tianjin. President Xi Jinping has made the transition to cleaner power a priority, but implementation hasn’t been smooth.
Switching industrial and residential users to gas pushed demand up 19 percent during the first 10 months of the year, according to data from China’s National Development & Reform Commission. And this is the second straight year that regulators’ efforts to reform the energy sector have fallen victim to their own success.
A drive in 2016 to limit coal output sent prices soaring and squeezed power companies. This year, the creation of natural gas infrastructure hasn’t kept up with the government’s push to tackle pollution, leading to the heating disruptions, a particular problem for the north, which has a winter climate similar to the US Midwest.
More than 1,000 households in the central Shaanxi province saw their heating suspended because of the gas shortage, cnwest.com reported. In the city of Wuhan, the local gas company reportedly said it would stop supplying gas to entertainment venues and asked people to stop cooking with the fuel during peak times of the day. In another town, gas-powered taxis and buses had to line up overnight after supplies were curbed.
Chinese have taken to social media to vent their frustrations, with some claiming their coal-fired heaters were dismantled and that elderly people and children were suffering from the cold. Even state media has spoken out, with the China Daily saying in an editorial that local officials were being too hasty in implementing the gas-for-coal drive. The environment ministry’s circular encouraging the use of coal if needed was sent to 28 cities and was marked urgent.