FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Tech

Russia's Newly Proposed Coal Plant Would Be the World's Biggest—by a Huge Margin

If the Keystone XL is a "carbon bomb" then this would be a nuclear warhead.
Taichung Power Plant. Image: Wikimedia

The biggest coal-fired power plant in the world today sits on the western shores of Taiwan. The image above does it little justice—the Taichung Power Plant is truly enormous. It's also probably the most profound polluter humankind has ever built: the plant emits 40 million tons of carbon dioxide every year. That's more than is emitted each year by the entire nation of Switzerland, one of the richest countries on earth.

But if a Russian energy company proceeds to build the coal plant it has proposed to supply China with a new font of power, Taichung will be absolutely dwarfed.

Advertisement

At a moment when headlines are shouting about melting ice sheets and inevitably rising seas, Russia's Inter RAO is considering erecting the largest, most-polluting coal plant in history. According to Reuters and state-run Chinese media, the proposed plant would boast 8 gigawatts of generating capacity. Taichung has a capacity of 5.5 GW—the new plant in Russia would be 45 percent bigger.

Given the lax-to-nonexistent regulation historically typical of the region, it would likely pollute 45 percent more, too. It'd be like adding another pollution-equivalent-of Switzerland and an entire Estonia or Bolivia to the world's pollution quotient—at a moment where we pretty desperately need to be moving in the opposite direction.

Another look at Taichung Power Plant. Image: Wikimedia

The move is hardly surprising, however, for a number of reasons. China recently inked a stunning $400 billion deal with Russia to get access to its mighty natural gas troves. Meanwhile, Inter RAO is already transmitting a huge amount of electricity to China; it produced 3.5 billion kilowatt-hours for the still-growing economic giant last year.

China is eager to reduce pollution in metropolitan areas like Beijing, which have become the world's most renowned smoggy hellholes. Like energy- and profit-hungry nations everywhere, however, that usually means unloading and burning the dirty carbon somewhere else.

Now that its increasingly prosperous and smog-besieged citizens are mobilizing to protest, China is trying to move its power plants out of town and avoid building any more near pollution centers. Exporting the dirty work to a remote part of Russia—its newly strengthened trading partner—probably strikes China's leadership as an ideal solution. The coal would be mined in Russia's far-east Amur region, and the plant would likely be built not too far off.

The Amur

All of which spells certain disaster for the already dimming prospects of maintaining a stable climate. Environmentalists here in the US have rallied against the Keystone XL pipeline, which, according to the NRDC's estimates, would facilitate an additional 24 million tons of carbon emissions each year—not even close to what Russia's sooty giant would belch out if its built as proposed. Opponents have called the Keystone XL a fuse on a "carbon bomb"—this coal plant, then, would be a nuclear warhead.