The upcoming Summer Olympic Games have galvanized the host city of Beijing into a frenzy of efforts to beautify its image. With the clock ticking down to August 8, 2008, Beijing has expedited the revitalization of buildings along the city’s major roads, painting worn gray exteriors with more vibrant colors. Flat rooftops have been converted to more-attractive sloped ones, and shoddy and chaotic one-story houses are now hidden behind newly erected ancient-style walls decorated with beautiful imagery.
The upcoming Summer Olympic Games have galvanized the host city of Beijing into a frenzy of efforts to beautify its image. With the clock ticking down to August 8, 2008, Beijing has expedited the revitalization of buildings along the city’s major roads, painting worn gray exteriors with more vibrant colors. Flat rooftops have been converted to more-attractive sloped ones, and shoddy and chaotic one-story houses are now hidden behind newly erected ancient-style walls decorated with beautiful imagery.
These efforts require large amounts of money. But the question is, are Beijing’s “image” fix-ups eating away at the funds needed to tackle some of the city’s more fundamental challenges, such as solid waste, sewage, and air pollution? Overlooked for so many years, these chronic environmental problems are attracting growing concern because of next year’s international events. The city’s air quality in particular has received the greatest attention.
One solution to Beijing’s air pollution woes is improving urban transportation—a change that is easy to recommend, but hard to implement. Since the 1990s, Li Zhengxiao, an associate professor with Peking University’s School of Physics, has worked with students to develop a new fuel additive he believes will reduce emissions and enhance car motors. The additive aims to improve combustion by making it easier for water droplets to cling to oil, helping the fuel burn more efficiently. After starting up a company, Li set off on a long journey to commercialize the research results.
The leader of the student team, Gong Yan, graduated from Peking University with a PhD in Physics and patented the technology, registering a company as well. But both his company and Li Zhengxiao’s have encountered difficulties in promoting their products. In particular, it has been extremely hard for them to break into the gasoline market. While there are many additive manufacturers in China, most of them either belong to or are somehow connected to the nation’s petroleum giants. Products from “outsiders” such as Li and Gong, even if they are superior in quality, cannot achieve much more than a handful of small retail sales.
Since the 1990s, Beijing has adopted cleaner fuels for its buses, including lead-free gasoline, natural gas, and liquid petroleum gas. The majority of the city’s buses now have two combustion systems to allow for dual-fuel use. But because the rising demand for natural gas by residents and industries has far outstripped the supply, burning this cleaner fuel in buses has been suspended for quite some time. And Beijing’s taxis and small cars are still gasoline guzzlers. It is said that over 1,000 new cars hit the city’s roads every day, adding to the existing vehicle fleet of 3.2 million.
One way to curb traffic pollution is to produce vehicles that emit few or no pollutants. Roughly in line with international efforts, China embarked on research on electric cars more than a decade ago. Tsinghua University in Beijing has also launched a major research unit on fuel cell vehicles and has set up a company, Tsing Energy Huatong Company, to commercialize its research results. But so far, none of the company’s products operate reliably outside the lab.
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In 2006, the German automaker DaimlerChrysler donated three fuel cell buses to Beijing, serving an 18-kilometer route between Renmin University and the Summer Palace Park that meanders past several leading universities and high-tech parks. But the pilot operation will terminate later this week. The buses are fueled by China’s first hydrogen refueling station at Zhongguangcun high-tech park, a joint project of Tsing Energy Huatong Company and the British oil and gas giant BP. With an investment of US$ 3.5 million, the station went into operation in November 2006 and is able to refuel 25 kilograms of hydrogen per bus per day. It represents China’s first complete hydrogen fueling system, including the necessary infrastructure and services.
Aside from the first day of operations, when the buses were filled with swarms of government officials, academics, and journalists, Beijing’s three fuel cell buses have failed to attract ridership. Releasing an odd white plume of water drops—the residue of hydrogen combustion—they are empty most of the time, and have become lonely roamers in a city of more than 14 million people. The signage is missing on all but two of the stops, and no detailed schedule information is available for hurried commuters. The buses are sporadically used by a handful of public transportation zealots or media people who care about future transportation trends. The failure of the buses illustrates, to a certain extent, how hard it can be to translate “white-elephant” projects into general practice.
Beijing’s air quality is also affected by domestic coal burning and pollution from neighboring regions. Although the city has imposed a strict ban on coal burning in the downtown area (inside the fourth ring road), the deeper you venture into the old city center, the less compliance you will find. Dongcheng, Xicheng, Xuanwu, and Chongwen, the four districts covering the residential area of the old town, are also home to the largest concentration of traditional housing structures. Here you will find small, single-story residences that lack well-functioning coal and gas pipelines. Coal, in the form of honeycomb briquettes, is the major source of fuel for cooking and heating, and the soot is discharged directly into the air through the chimney.
Although coal burning in Beijing’s older districts has ceased to be a major threat to the city’s air quality, the cure for this problem is long overdue. The situation illustrates how recalcitrant urban problems can be if the city fails to find innovative and effective ways to correct past mistakes in urban construction.
Beijing’s greater concern, however, is pollution from the outside. Beijing obtains its electricity from coal-fired power plants in north China, one of the country’s four major coal-power regions. China’s top economic planning body, the National Development and Reform Commission, recently enacted a policy encouraging the merging or closing of smaller coal-fired power generation units in favor of larger ones. The idea is that shutting down the smaller, 50–100 megawatt units would free up the “pollution capacity” to build larger, 600–2,400 megawatt supercritical units that would save coal and use desulfurization technologies. While this has been frantically welcomed by power plants and may reduce sulfur emissions, however, it does little to curb carbon dioxide emissions and may in fact increase them because of the additional generation capacity.
The provinces and regions of Shanxi, Inner Mongolia, and Hebei that surround or are northwest of Beijing harbor numerous coal-fired power plants that serve the capital city. The power they generate has fueled the expansion of highly energy-consuming and polluting local industries, including chemicals and smelting. It is impossible for Beijing to close all such plants, but the central government may try to limit their production during the Olympic Games. Beijing is also considering a regional pollution-prevention-and-control mechanism to clean up the air for the Olympics. This includes information sharing and feedback systems such as pollution source monitoring and discharge data reports, air monitoring data reports, air quality alarm reports, and air pollution prevention and reduction conferences in various cities and provinces.
Research confirms that air pollution at the periphery of Beijing has a direct influence on the city’s air quality, according to Pei Chenghu, the deputy head of Beijing’s Municipal Environmental Protection Bureau (EPB). On June 20, 2006, for example, the EPB reported that the local air quality was of the satisfactory “second” grade, but the air itself was visibly very poor. Satellite mapping revealed that peasants in neighboring Hebei province to the city’s south were burning huge quantities of wheat stalks, and the smoke had migrated over Beijing’s sky. Thus, air pollution is not a local problem, but a regional one.
The Beijing government has invested 26 million yuan (roughly US$3.3 million) into research on the impacts of air pollution from surrounding regions on the city’s air quality. Carried out by the School of Environment of Peking University, this research covers Beijing, Tianjin, Hebei, Shanxi, and Inner Mongolia. It includes identifying pollution sources, the paths that pollution takes en route to Beijing, and—ultimately—methods of improving air quality for the 2008 Olympic Games.
Yongfeng Feng is an acclaimed journalist at China Guangming Daily who reports and writes on science and technology issues. Outside contributions to China Watch reflect the views of the authors and are not necessarily the views of the Worldwatch Institute.
