The South China Morning Post reported on the 18th that according to a report by energy consultant Wood Mackenzie, “Tectonic shift: China’s world-changing push for energy independence,” solar, wind, nuclear, and storage projects are expected to be the focus if the Chinese Communist Party is to achieve carbon neutrality by 2060. According to the report, “Tectonic shift: China’s world-changing push for energy independence,” if the Chinese Communist Party is to achieve carbon neutrality by 2060, it is expected that solar, wind, nuclear, and energy storage projects will be the focus, and that these generation and storage facilities will generate enough electricity to meet about 75 percent of future electricity demand growth and replace the energy lost through fossil fuel use cuts by 2060. Energy.
The report notes that the Chinese Communist Party will face challenges in securing supplies of certain key raw materials such as copper, aluminum, nickel, cobalt and lithium as it moves forward with its carbon-neutral plans, and that copper is expected to be China’s “Achilles heel” for green energy development, given that mainland China is the world’s largest manufacturer of wind turbines and that copper is critical to the manufacture of electricity transmission, power lines and wind turbines. “.
Yanting Zhou, a senior economist at Wood Mackenzie and one of the report’s authors, pointed to mainland China’s dependence on foreign miners for copper supplies (buying more than 50 percent of total global supply) as a major problem for the country, and one that has fueled its determination to seek greater control over the supply of other raw materials. According to the report, mainland China controls just 16 percent of the global copper mining market.
According to the report, mainland China will need 7.5 million tons of copper per year in the future based on current usage, but despite about 10 years of investment in overseas copper mines, China’s copper supply has yet to improve.
The report further argues that mainland China’s “double-cycle” policy is also a blueprint for achieving its carbon neutrality goals, which will drive the domestic economy to develop more green energy projects and produce more environmentally friendly products, while reducing the economy’s dependence on carbon-intensive industries. By becoming carbon neutral, China will become energy independent and have a safer energy supply chain, as the country is still heavily dependent on imported fossil fuels.
The report also says that the scale of the challenges facing mainland China in going green (from producing green hydrogen to carbon offsetting measures) is significant and that it will need partners to help decarbonize, such as working with Australia, which is important.
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