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Page added on February 7, 2013
China sets timetable for cleaner fuel standards
China’s cabinet has issued a timetable for oil companies to deliver cleaner fuel nationwide beginning this year, the Xinhua news agency reported, but the new standards won’t become mandatory for four years despite rising public anger over choking air pollution.
Thick smog has blanketed many Chinese cities in recent weeks and auto emissions are among the major contributors to the pollution.
A new standard will be issued for automobile petrol that caps sulfur content within 10 parts per million (ppm) before the end of the year, with a grace period extending to the end of 2017, Xinhua said after an executive meeting of the State Council that was chaired by Premier Wen Jiabao.
Beijing is so far the only city in China to have adopted such a standard, equal to Europe’s Euro V, it said in a report late on Wednesday.
Excessive pollution levels have prompted the Beijing government to roll out a series of temporary emergency measures, such as shutting down 103 heavily polluting factories and taking 30 percent of government vehicles off roads. Despite those steps, the capital’s air has remained hazardous on many days.
A new standard for automobile diesel that would limit sulfur content to within 10 ppm will come before June this year but will also have the same four-year grace period, Xinhua said.
The General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine and the Standardization Administration would soon issue a transitional standard for automobile diesel with sulfuric content within 50 ppm that would expire at the end of 2014.
Cleaner fuel may also mean higher prices. The cabinet said prices should be “fixed properly” and subsidies should be given to disadvantaged people and non-profit organizations.
Analysts say foot dragging by China’s highly influential state oil companies, which will need to upgrade refining equipment to meet the new standards, has contributed to the pollution problem.
3 Comments on "China sets timetable for cleaner fuel standards"
DC on Thu, 7th Feb 2013 5:16 pm
No mention of the real problem of course, cars themselves.The idea here is that if you make gas-burners fuel ‘less dirty’ then all will be well again? Notice who was not subject to this law, thats right…Auto companies. And who are they in China? Mostly General Motors! Remember those guys. Of course Ford, and EU and Japanese companies are also well represented on Chinas basically stand-still road systems(also designed with the help of amerikan ‘traffic and road engineers’). It took the until 1996 to ban lead in gas in the United States of Exxon.
Oxymoronic ‘clean’ gas wont have anything more than a cosmetic effect, if that, on Chinas choking air pollution, and it also has the neat effect of completely ignoring the real cause of the problem,
Cars!
So much for the ability of all-powerful centralized dictatorships to address serious problems eh? Seems they are as much at the whims of corporate power as the rest of us.
BillT on Fri, 8th Feb 2013 1:06 am
Of course! Corporations run the world and a few hundred elite run the corporations. Those are the real leaders today. But, they are running scared because Mother Nature is going to take it all away soon. Very soon.
Kenz300 on Fri, 8th Feb 2013 5:42 pm
The Cuyahoga river in America catching fire sparked a change in environmental policy and regulation in America.
Maybe the chocking smog will do the same for China.
If the world is to slow the impact of climate change, China will need to stop building any more coal fired power plants. They have increased their investments in alternative energy sources like wind and solar but coal fired power plants continue to be built.
The progress that China and India make in addressing pollution and the use of fossil fuels will impact each of us.