The future of coal looks like an ice-cream truck parked half a kilometer down a mine shaft in China’s Shanxi province. The yellow-and-white vehicle is equipped with a 5G router from Huawei Technologies Co. to gather data for the mine’s control center, where technicians monitor high-definition feeds on a screen the size of a two-story house. They’re tracking temperature and methane concentrations while keeping watch over the black lumps zipping along conveyor belts on the way up to waiting trucks.
The data collection would previously have been done by workers down in the pit, but Yangquan Coal Industry Group has managed to eliminate some of those workers and virtualize the least appealing aspect of mine labor. “It will take time, but in the future, miners will wear suits and white shirts,” says Han Weihai, manager of Huawei’s mine projects in Shanxi. “People no longer want to work in a mine, especially young people with college degrees.”
When President Xi Jinping announced in September that China would be carbon-neutral by 2060, he gave coal a four-decade transition period. Or even longer, perhaps, if China’s vast and politically powerful coal industry can find a way to capture the planet-warming pollution generated by burning the fuel, or find other ways around the national policy.
The long transition buys China time to use up its vast coal resources and figure out how to gradually shut down an industry that still employs, directly and indirectly, tens of millions of people. Nowhere shows this high-tech trajectory for China’s coal sector better than the Xinyuan mine.
The operation produces about 2.4 million tons of coal a year, less than a tenth of a percent of China’s current demand. That much coal could generate as much as 5 million metric tons of carbon dioxide when it’s burned, even as Xinyuan employs emissions-reducing techniques such as using methane instead of coal in its boilers.
Coal’s long exit is part of a two-speed approach proposed by climate scientists at Tsinghua University. Citing the inertia of energy and economic systems, they proposed allowing coal power plants to continue being built until around 2030, when China will be richer and replacement technologies will have advanced. Then the plan calls for the ongoing transition to solar and nuclear to accelerate sharply.
Easing off coal slowly would reduce abrupt shocks that risk bringing unrest, the Communist Party’s biggest nightmare, by dulling the inevitable pain to China’s army of coal workers. “The industry will cut jobs, but it should be slow and gradual,” says Wang Haigang, Xinyuan’s deputy general manager. His mine had 3,000 workers in 2012, and by 2025 plans to have fewer than 1,000. “It may take a long time, but we’re aiming for a future in which no workers need to work underground.”