北京可能對煤炭的依賴比石油更甚

 Recently Yahoo News reported the following:

Beijing May Be More Addicted to Coal Than Oil

David Fickling

Bloomberg September 5, 2020, 5:00 p.m. PDT

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- There’s one surprise entrant in the group of oil companies announcing plans this year for how they’ll reduce emissions: PetroChina Co.

China’s oil companies, unlike their peers in the U.S. and particularly Europe, don’t traditionally treat climate targets as a major issue. Beijing, after all, isn’t even promising to hit its emissions peak until 2030.

The large fund managers that have been pressuring Western oil companies to improve their carbon commitments don’t make much difference, either. PetroChina’s chairman, Dai Houliang, is a Communist bureaucrat whose more significant job is party secretary of state-owned parent China National Petroleum Corp. His main role at PetroChina is to make sure it plays its part in guaranteeing energy security, one of Beijing’s most critical issues. As shareholders will no doubt be bitterly aware, their interests are neither here nor there.

So PetroChina’s announcement in its half-year results last week that it would seek a “near-zero” target for emissions by 2050 is unexpected. With China preparing its 14th five-year plan — probably the most crucial document in determining whether the planet can avoid devastating climate change — that might be taken as a sign that the winds of change are blowing through Beijing.

It’s probably best not to get too excited, though. In most countries, the chief objective is to minimize reliance on the worst-polluting of fossil fuels: coal. In China, however, bureaucrats are more preoccupied with self-sufficiency, so limiting oil imports is a bigger concern. In that sense, PetroChina’s announcement may just be further confirmation that it’s national security considerations, rather than climate, that’s driving energy policy in Zhongnanhai.

Have a look at what’s happening to PetroChina’s core business and it’s obvious why the company may have other reasons for pivoting to renewables. Oil output from its domestic wells has been more or less flat for four years, despite strong demand growth. While gas production has increased in line with government policy, the cost has been enormous, as we’ve written: Three-year average all-in finding and development costs for its petroleum wells are running at $21.74 a barrel, well above most Western oil majors.

PetroChina isn’t alone in this. Getting more hydrocarbons out of China’s unpromising soil has been getting harder for some time. Despite domestic demand increasing by about a third between 2015 and 2019, production from local wells fell 11%. As a result, the country went from importing 31% of its crude in 2002 to 72% last year, at a cost of some $220 billion.

There’s no shortage of policy ambition to reduce this dependence. China has some of the world’s most generous and long-standing subsidies for electric vehicles, nearly half the world’s electric car fleet and about 99% of its electric buses. Concerns that a rival power could turn off the lights by blockading the Strait of Malacca in the event of war also appear to have driven the construction of a multibillion-dollar pipeline to the coast of Myanmar.

Coal is a very different picture. Thanks to vast domestic reserves and demand that’s down about 9.2% since peaking in 2013, China has consistently been able to source around 95% of its solid carbon domestically. Just last year it completed a 1,814 kilometer (1,127 mile) railway to shift soot south from its main mining regions north and west of Beijing toward destinations further south, which have traditionally been dependent on imports. Premier Li Keqiang has repeatedly promoted “cleaner and more efficient use of coal” in speeches about the country’s energy policy.

Solid fuel still has problems in China. The gradual deregulation of the country’s power market is resulting in spot prices in key provinces far below costs for coal-fired power stations, according to BloombergNEF analyst Hanyang Wei — though their dependence on long-term power purchase contracts will soften that blow for a while. Despite having some 98.5 gigawatts of new coal-fired power stations under construction, the generation sector has been plagued with overcapacity for years, too. As a whole, the country’s fleet runs less than half the time, levels at which it’s hard to turn a profit. Nonetheless, in contrast to China’s relatively strong government policies to limit oil demand, coal remains a favored sector.

That’s a tragic mistake. If China is worried about energy security, there’s no type of power less import-dependent than renewables. More to the point, emissions are a present and future danger to the Chinese people. Some 47,240 lives each year have been saved by a crackdown on particulate emissions between 2013 and 2017, according to one study. The devastation wrought by this summer’s flooding of the Yangtze is a small foretaste of what's to come in a future where higher global temperatures lead to heavier, more damaging rainfall episodes.

PetroChina’s near-zero ambition may be less than meets the eye. Its peers in the state-owned coal and power sector would still do well to match — and exceed — it.

Translation

（彭博社觀點）- 在今年宣布如何減少排放的計石油公司中, 有一個令人驚訝的參與者 -- 中國石油公司（PetroChina Co.） 。

中國的石油公司與美國, 尤其是歐洲的石油公司不同，傳統上並不將氣候目標視為主要問題，畢竟，北京甚至不承諾在會在2030年達到排放峰值。

大型基金經理一直在向西方石油公司施壓以提高其碳排放承諾但也沒有做出太大的分別。中石油董事長戴厚良是共產黨官僚，其更重要的工作是作為國有母公司中國石油天然氣集團公司黨委書記。他在中石油的主要職責是確保他在保障能源安全方面發可揮應有的作用，這是北京最關鍵的問題之一。毫無疑問股東們會痛苦地意識到，這是與他們的利益無關。

因此，中石油在上周宣布的半年度業績中說，將在2050年之前尋求“零排放”的目標是出乎意料的。因為中國正在準備第十四個五年計 -- 這可能是決定地球是否能夠實現這一目標的最關鍵文件, 去避免破壞性的氣候變化 -- 亦可能被視為變化之風正在席捲北京。

不過，我們最好不要太興奮。在大多數國家，其主要目標是在最大程度地減少對化石燃料污染最嚴重的煤炭的依賴；而在中國，官僚主義者更注重自給自足，因此要限制了石油進口是一個更大的問題。從這個意義上講，中石油的公告可能只是在進一步確認，國家安全考慮而非氣候因素正在推動中南海的能源政策。

看看中石油的核心業務正在發生什麼，就很明顯地顯出該公司為何還有其他原因要去轉向可再生能源的。儘管需求強勁增長，但其國內油井的石油產量四年來只是基本持平。儘管天然氣產量隨著政府政策的增長而增加，但代價卻是巨大的 : 正如我們所寫的那樣，根據政府政策而增加的成本是巨大的：其石油井的三年​​平均的發現和開發成本為每桶21.74美元，遠高於大多數西方石油巨頭。

在這方面中石油還不是個單一事件。在一段時期以來，要從中國窮脊的土壤中獲取更多的碳氫化合物變得越來越困難，儘管2015年至2019年間國內需求增長了約三分之一，但當地油井的產量卻下降了11％。結果是該國的原油進口量從2002年的31％增至去年的72％，耗資約2200億美元。

中國有不少減低這種依賴的政策想望。中國擁有世界上最慷慨，最長期的電動汽車補貼，有近一半的世界電動汽車車隊以及約99％的電動客車。擔心敵對勢力如果在戰爭發生時會封鎖馬六甲海峽來關掉供應，也似乎驅使了建設通往緬甸海岸的數十億美元的供油管道。

煤炭的情況截然不同。得益於龐大的國內儲量和自2013年達到頂峰以來, 需求下降了約9.2％，中國一直能夠在國內供應約95％的固體碳。僅去年一年就完成了1,814公里（1,127公里）鐵路，以將碳從北京北部和西部的主要礦區向南移送至傳統上依賴進口的目的地。李克強總理在有關該國能源政策的演說中一再提倡 “更清潔，更高效地使用煤炭” 。

中國的固體燃料仍然存在問題。BloombergNEF 分析師 Hanyang Wei表示，由於該國電力市場的逐漸放鬆管制, 導致重點省份的現貨價格遠低於燃煤電站的成本 -- 儘管它們依賴長期購電合同將能減輕這一打擊。儘管有98.5吉瓦的新建燃煤電廠正在建設中，但發電行業多年來也一直受到產能過剩的困擾。總體而言，該國的發電行業總編制運行時間是不到一半。然而，與中國相對強力限製石油需求的政府政策相比，煤炭仍然是一個受青睞的行業。

這是一個悲劇性的錯誤。如果中國擔心能源安全，那麼沒有什麼能源比再生能源更不依賴進口。更重要的是，排放是中國人民現在和將來的危險。一項研究顯示, 通過2013年至2017年間的嚴厲打擊顆粒物排放, 每年挽救了47,240條生命。今年夏天長江水災造成的破壞只是對全球氣溫升高導致的未來的一個小預兆，全球氣溫升高會導致更大，更具有破壞性的降雨事件。

中國石油的近乎零的指望可能不足以吸引關注。但在國有煤炭和電力行業的同輩，仍然可以很好地做出匹配，甚至超越它。

              So, this article shows that China has to import oil to support its manufacturing industry. For China, coal is cheap and its supply is guaranteed while oil is expensive and its import could not be guaranteed when international crises arise.