China is winning in every imaginable way
The West is de-industrialising itself in the quest for Net Zero. The People’s Republic is not
David Blackmon
A coal fired power plant in operation Credit: Matthias Schrader/AP
I honestly laughed out loud when I read this headline at
Oilprice.com Friday morning: “China is Winning The Race for Ultra-Fast Charging EV Batteries,” it says. The story is about the race to come up with an EV battery that might solve that particular
chronic issue in the electric car space, but it could have been about pretty much any aspect of this government-forced energy transition race to net zero.
Whether you’re talking about EVs, wind, solar, electric power generation, manufacturing, minerals processing, or control of supply chains for pretty much everything,
China is indeed “winning the race.”
Take a look at another pair of headlines that ran in the media this week. The first is from Energy Live News,
which reports, “UK ‘green steel’: Switch to electric furnaces delayed until 2032.” Oh.
What’s that about, you ask? Well, British Steel had shut down its existing blast furnaces fired by coal this year, with a plan to convert them to electric arc technology by the end of 2025. Just one problem, though: The UK’s National Grid says the incredible amount of power generation capacity required won’t be available now until 2032. The troubling trend in this energy transition has been that, if any western government entity is committing to a 2032 target, you can bet that it will be revised to 2040 or even later sometime in the coming few years.
By then, of course, the British Steel plants – which are conveniently now owned by a Chinese conglomerate – will have been mothballed far too long to hope for a revival using the magical “green” electricity promised by National Grid. Thus, the deindustrialisation of the UK’s once-powerful economy remains set in stone.
Another
telling headline comes from Germany, where a rapid deindustrialisation in the pursuit of net zero has been underway for several years now. That headline comes from Reuters: “Germany’s Thyssenkrupp reviews green steel production plans, shares fall,” it says.
That headline is quite descriptive of the story’s content. Venerable industrial powerhouse Thyssenkrupp had plans to convert one of its coal-fired steel plants to beautiful green hydrogen. The hydrogen no doubt would be created using lovely green windmills and solar arrays – most of which would be manufactured in China, of course – and it would all be really safe and affordable!
Except, it isn’t affordable, not at all. Reuters reports management at Thyssenkrupp is halting progress on a planned $3.3 billion investment in a hydrogen-based direct reduction project because, “the planned direct reduction site in Duisburg could cost more than initially expected.” Nobody could have possibly seen that one coming!
Thus does yet another steel plant based in a former European industrial powerhouse country go idle. Yet, the world – including Germany and the UK – still needs the steel, now more than ever. So, where will the steel-making capacity be made up? Why, in China, of course. The furnaces there won’t be fired by clean, green electricity or hydrogen, but by coal. Because, well, coal is the most energy-efficient, cheapest way to fire the blast furnaces needed to make the steel. Physics still matters.
Another recent headline out of the UK reads, “United Kingdom closes its last coal-fired power plant.” That September 30 header
came from CBS News, and again is descriptive of the story itself: The last coal power plant in the UK was shuttered at the end of September, bringing an end to an era as the UK government strives to meet its carbon reduction goals.
But while the UK is indeed cutting its own carbon dioxide emissions by a radical deindustrialisation of its economy, does that mean a reduction in global carbon emissions? No, because China continues to build more new coal-fired power plants than the rest of the world combined. China’s government prioritizes energy security over worries about the atmosphere, and it needs cheap, reliable generating capacity to power all of the industrial plants it is inheriting from countries like the UK and Germany.
Thus, by deindustrialising their own economies, the countries in the Western world are simply transferring their own carbon emissions – and economic power – to China. The inevitable end result will be subservience to China.
So yes, China is indeed winning in every imaginable way.
www.dw.com
