Does China Have Enough Water to Burn Coal?

China’s demand for coal continues to rise, but the parched country faces challenging finding enough water to cool its coal-fired power plants

By many measures, this northern Chinese city is an ideal candidate for being China’s Wyoming.

It has more brown coal reserves than any other Chinese region, and it is only 600 kilometers away from power-hungry Beijing. The sparsely populated landscape here provides enough space for new coal mines and downstream businesses.

There’s just one problem: The coal industry consumes huge amounts of water, while this land is one of China’s driest. Informal ads offering well-drilling services hang everywhere outside of Xilinhot’s coal fields, signaling how pressing the conflict is.

China’s demand for coal is creating a fierce competition for water. The nation has been scrambling for ways to ease the water scarcity, but proposed remedies raise more questions than answers.

Currently, more than half of China’s industrial water usage is in coal-related sectors, including mining, preparation, power generation, coke production and coal-to-chemical factories, according to China Water Risk, a nonprofit initiative based in Hong Kong. That means that the water demand of the Chinese coal industry surpasses that of all other industries combined.

A geographic mismatch worsens the water stress. Statistics from China Water Risk show that 85 percent of China’s coal lies in the north, which has 23 percent of the country’s water resources. As the majority of the Chinese coal industry is built where coal reserves are, those water-scarce regions are increasingly pressured to give more water.

To answer China’s rising appetite for power, Chinese policymakers have decided to establish 16 large-scale coal industrial hubs by 2015. If the plan materializes, those hubs are estimated to consume nearly 10 billion cubic meters of water annually, equivalent to more than one-quarter of the water the Yellow River supplies in a normal year, according to a report jointly issued last year by the environmental group Greenpeace and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Researchers from the two groups say that China is now running into a tough choice: Should it adjust the national coal development plan that is set to fuel the economy, or should it go ahead and build up large-scale coal industrial hubs that could cause a serious water crisis?

Water quality also at stake

Already, the Yellow River, China’s second-longest river and the cradle of ancient Chinese civilization, is at high alert due to overwithdrawal of water by riverside industries, most of which are related to coal.

Some coal businesses have dammed streams for their own water use, cutting off a lifeline to ecosystems downstream. In Inner Mongolia, the practice has turned the Wulagai wetland — once home to swans, red-crowned cranes and other species — into an immense desert region that is now the origin of sandstorms in Beijing.

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