China and coal series in Technology Review
MIT’s Technology Review has an interesting two-part series on China and its growing dependence on coal as a way to keep up with its runaway economic growth. The article talks about how slowly the country is moving toward cleaner-coal options, such as using integrated gasification combined cycle plants, mostly because building pulverized-coal plants are viewed as a license to print money by Chinese industrialists, who are taking advantage of the country’s move to a more open economy. It also says that gasification technology would likely be more mature in China today if the country’s state-run utility of the past, State Power Corp., still had a monopoly brace on the market. The two articles can be read here and here.
Another unrelated article in Technology Review tells us that U.S. government R&D spending on alternative energy technologies is beginning to fizzle out just as the public is expecting more attention to technologies for combating global warming and pollution. Apparently some program budgets are being cut by up to 20 per cent and funding for new programs has been halted altogether. An unfortunate state of affairs.
Tyler Hamilton is editor-in-chief of Corporate Knights magazine and a business columnist for the Toronto Star, Canada's largest daily newspaper. In addition to this Clean Break blog, Tyler writes a weekly column of the same name that discusses trends, happenings and innovators in the clean technology and green energy market. This blog is a personal project started in April 2005. It is not an official blog of the newspaper.
