RSS
Home
China to increase natural gas usage for electric power production
Print
Email
RSS
Subscribe
It was reported that PetroChina Co. Ltd. has formed an agreement with Huaneng Power to supply natural gas for new electric power production. This will help China minimize the problems it is having with increasing electric production from coal fired power plants.
China is growing between its economy between 7% and 10% per year, which places huge demands for new power production. Just increasing electric production from coal would cause increased air pollution, not to mention the increased output of carbon dioxide that contributes to global warming. Natural gas causes minimal air pollution and produces only half the carbon dioxide as burning coal for the same energy output.
PetroChina increased it natural gas production 14% in 2008. New sources of natural gas are coming from both domestic and foreign supplies.
Renewable resources like wind and solar only produce a very small fraction of the world’s total electric production now and it will be decades before we can produce enough electricity from these resources to meaningfully reduce our use of fossil fuels. We will eventually need to convert all of our energy production to renewable resources; not just because of environment concerns, but also fossil fuels are a finite resource. Natural gas is a cleaner fuel than coal that can be used as a bridge until we are able to produce all of our energy from renewable resources.
