Lifelong ties to the environment
For hundreds of years, coal was the primary fuel used for cooking and heating
in Beijing. Yellowish-gray smoke enveloped the city around mealtimes. When the
Beijing Coking-Chemistry Plant was established in 1959, it was given an
historical mission to help people switch from burning lumps of coal to using gas
to cook their food and heat their homes.
The dominance of coal and gas energy culminated in 1980s and 90's, after the
number of private users in Beijing fanned out in the 1970s. When the plant was
established, it only provided gas to some places where the central government
was located. The number of private gas consumers increased significantly in the
1970s, and peaked in the 1990s.
At that time, the factory had nearly 10,000 employees working to provide a
stable gas supply to city residents and big plants. A small urban railway
station was used to transport about 200 daily loads of coal and coke for the
factory.
When natural gas was discovered to be a cleaner fuel with rich reserves in
North China, coal gas was doomed to fade out.
The natural gas pipeline was first connected to Beijing in 1985, but
small-scale natural gas use didn't immediately shake the major role coal gas
played in the city.
It wasn't until October of 1997, when natural gas, pumped 860 kilometers away
from huge reserves in northern Shaanxi Province finally reached Beijing, that
mass commercial supply became possible.
The city's coal gas supply system was gradually replaced, and people became
less tolerant of the pollution caused by the factory.
Two of the factory's six furnaces were shut down as of 2002. The last batch
of 6,000 coal gas users switched to natural gas on July 4 this year. The rest of
the coal gas stored in the factory's reserves will go to a nearby thermo-power
generation plant.
The improvement in Beijing's environment from the relocation of the factory
will be apparent - cutting down the burning of 2.96 million tons of coal and 4.3
billion cubic meters of exhaust emissions.
"The factory was set up to meet environmental needs, and production was
halted for the environment too," a factory official said.
