Change in the air

Michal Meidan, vice-president for research at Energy Aspects, a London-based energy consulting company, said: "Natural gas is a big improvement over coal in terms of pollution but also in terms of worker safety. Worker accidents and mining accidents all have been rampant and a source of concern for many years. By switching to natural gas, you get fewer accidents in the industrial workplace. You don't need the big piles of coal you did to fuel furnaces."

Myllyvirta, of Greenpeace, said: “In the winter, we know that heating is an important source of outdoor pollution affecting cities and so on. But the biggest health impact of heating with coal is the indoor pollution of people living in houses where coal is used for heating and cooking. Beijing's average PM2.5 is now around 60 (micrograms per cubic meter). If you heat with coal, you easily have several hundreds or even more than 1,000 inside your house."

According to the World Health Organization, local smog in general－which leads to increased risk of stroke, heart disease, asthma, and lung cancer－consists of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and dust and other particles. Also, carbon dioxide emissions lead to global warming, though they are not locally harmful.

Sulfur dioxide is created mostly by burning coal. Nitrogen oxides, and the ground-level ozone that is created when they interact with sunlight, come mostly from motor vehicles. Dust and other particles are made airborne largely by construction, truck traffic or wind from desert areas.

Natural gas is much cleaner than coal, both globally and locally. Locally, it produces almost no sulfur dioxide and less nitrogen oxides than is created by gasoline or diesel engines.

Recent analysis by a team at Peking University's Guanghua School of Management concluded that, by the end of 2017, the switch from coal to natural gas and electricity in the Beijing area was successful in nearly eliminating the sulfur dioxide pollution from coal, but little progress had been made against nitrogen oxides.

Chen Songxi, a professor at Guanghua, described the conclusions of a forthcoming publication: "The move from coal to natural gas is reflected in the dramatic, roughly 50 percent, falls in sulfur dioxide levels throughout the region since 2013. This was true in highly industrialized towns as well as in Beijing. Beijing's level already reached single digits in 2016, in the summer and spring, which is very close to European cities.

Liu Baoxian, deputy director of the Beijing Environmental Monitoring Center, said, "The average annual concentration of sulfur dioxide saw a historical low of only 8 micrograms per cubic meter"－far below the national standard of 60.

On the other hand, Chen said, "The other component of PM2.5 is nitrogen oxides, mostly from car emissions. We have seen little change in it. The other thing we see in the region is that the ozone level has been going up significantly. The number of cars in Beijing has pretty much leveled off but is not being decreased."

Supply sources

The winter of 2017 was a perfect storm for natural gas. For example, gas shipments from Turkmenistan fell by 32 percent from September to November, which could not be made up by volume from Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, according to China’s customs authority. In addition, a large Sinopec liquefied natural gas terminal in Tianjin did not become ready for commercial shipments until this month.

Domestic production of natural gas increased by 10.5 percent, while imports made up the difference, growing by 28.9 percent. As of 2016, China's gas came from 60 percent domestic production and 40 percent imports, but the central government expects imports to grow to 50 percent by 2020.

Imports consist of liquid natural gas, imported by ship, and pipelines, currently mostly from Central Asian countries. A new pipeline from Russia is expected to bring natural gas to Northeast China and to Shanghai by 2020. However, LNG is abundantly available and can provide flexible supply－especially once receiving terminals and underground storage capacity are completed.

In 2017, LNG took a bigger share of the imports. China imported 68 million metric tons in 2017－of which 38 million tons was LNG and 30 million tons was from pipelines. The previous year, the total was 54 million tons, of which 26 million tons was LNG and 27 million tons from pipelines, according to Meidan, of Energy Aspects.

China's LNG imports surpassed those of South Korea to become the world's second-largest after Japan. According to Marc Howson, director of the LNG market at S&P Global Platts, a further increase to 50 million metric tons is expected in 2018. Australia is the major supplier, followed by Qatar, Malaysia, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea.

The US Energy Information Agency estimates that China has huge supplies of unconventional shale gas, about equal to those of the US and Canada combined. However, extraction of that gas is still in the early stages.

"Sinopec is developing shale with quite good results in Chongqing, producing 5 billion to 7 billion cubic meters of gas, quite a good accomplishment," said Meidan. "However, the geology is still unclear, and therefore the technological needs and the pricing environment are all open questions. Even the US shale revolution that essentially took off in 2000 and reached a dramatic increase in output within five years was almost 20 years in the making－thousands of wells had been drilled by private firms, backed by various government incentive schemes. And when shale took off, natural gas prices were high enough to sustain development efforts."

Natural gas use is expected to grow to 10 percent of China's total energy mix, up from around 7 percent now. Combined with an even stronger emphasis on anti-pollution enforcement, it will be a key component of a cleaner mix of energy use and upgraded industry.

Emphasizing that air pollution control doesn't conflict with the effort of developing the economy and improving people's lives, Wang Guoqing, spokesman for the first session of 13th National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference, said: "Development with high emissions and pollution affects not only long-term economic development, but also people's health. That is not the development we want."