FEATURE: Shanxi launches blitz on polluting coke-makers
According to a post on the government’s website on March 23, the campaign began in mid-March and will continue until September 30 which, Mysteel notes, is just one day prior to the start of celebrations in nearby Beijing for China's 70th National Day.
“Our province is a major coke producing centre, with coking capacity being top nationwide and accounting for a fifth of the country’s total. (But) there are still many problems in the sustainable development of the coke industry, particularly the environmental protection capability,” the post noted. During 2018, Shanxi’s more than 100 merchant coke-makers produced 92.6 million tonnes of coke, equal to 21% of China's total. Data for the coke the province’s steelmakers also produced from their in-house coke batteries is not available.
The 13-page document posted on the province’s site and seen by Mysteel devoted considerable detail to the eight major loopholes the campaign of inspections and plant visits aims to close. These included illegal construction of coking capacity and illegal production, plus the emitting of pollutants without permits or of pollutants surpassing provincially-approved standards or where discharges are unsupervised by local authorities. The illegal disposal of solid waste will also be targeted, the post disclosed.
Spearheading the crackdown will be a provincial inspection team led by the director of Shanxi’s ecology and environment department which will fan out across the province’s nine major cities. However, responsibility for executing the checks and verifying that improvements are made will fall to the city- and county-level environmental protection departments, Mysteel understands.
The campaign has three components, beginning with the requirement over March 15-April 15 that all coke-makers conduct detailed inspections of their facilities themselves against the government’s working-schedule checklist.
Then, between April 16-August 15, city authorities in Shanxi will check all merchant coke plants under their jurisdictions one-by-one to record all the problems found, issuing fines to makers if environmental issues are uncovered. All failures of equipment and facilities must be corrected within the given time ordered by the authorities, and those coke-makers found to have seriously violated the regulations will have their plants idled until the faults are rectified.
For the last step over August 16-September 30, the provincial inspection team will conduct a final round of inspections to check if all the environmental problems are solved, according to the notification. Whether this will consist of unannounced spot checks is unclear.
The launch of the blitz is clearly Shanxi’s response to the battle China’s central government is waging to address the country's serious air pollution problems, given that parts of Shanxi remain among the country’s most polluted. Yet, though the crackdown may be severe, the campaign may not cause the disruptions to production and market instability resulting from other similar crackdowns.
“The impact of the checks in Shanxi may not immediately impact Chinese merchant coke prices as the government’s initiative is not an emergency measure but a six-month plan,” an analyst based in Shanghai commented. The provincial authorities are not aiming to achieve interim restrictions on coke operations in Shanxi, but at the longer-term and effective curbing of toxic emissions, he explained, an approach confirmed to Mysteel by an official with a Shanxi-based coke plant.
“Production at our coke plant has been under general restrictions for some time but as of now, we have not received any new notification on tighter controls,” she told Mysteel. She implied however that when the city authorities start their inspections, the plant may adopt stricter controls on pollutant emissions.
As of March 26, news of Shanxi’s crackdown had not resulted in any firming of Chinese merchant coke prices, with Mysteel’s coke price index actually falling by Yuan 93.8/t ($14/t) on week to Yuan 1,906.9/t including the 16% VAT.
Written by Sean Xie, xiepy@mysteel.com
Edited by Russ McCulloch, russ.mcculloch@mysteel.com
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