Aerial photo taken on Dec. 3, 2020 shows a view of the Mahuangliang Loess Geopark after snow in Yulin City, northwest China's Shaanxi Province.Photo:Xinhua

Chinese President Xi Jinping stressed a green and low-carbon development path for the country's energy industry during an inspection tour to a major clean coal production base in Northwest China's Shaanxi Province on Monday.

Xi made the remarks while visiting a chemical enterprise under the China Energy Investment Corp in Yulin city, Shaanxi Province, according to the Xinhua News Agency. Continued efforts should be made to boost the energy industry so as to underpin the modernization of the country, while the development of the coal industry should be transformed and upgraded, following a green and low-carbon path, he said.

Such efforts would be conducive to reaching the country's goals for peaking carbon dioxide emissions and achieving carbon neutrality without straining resources, energy and environmental capacity, Xi said.

The visit sends an important message that the country will take a green path in its formulated roadmap for achieving carbon peaking and carbon neutrality, experts noted.

"Coal is China's main energy source, so we mainly rely on coal, at least in the short to medium term," Lin Boqiang, Director of the China Center for Energy Economics Research at Xiamen University, told the Global Times on Tuesday, noting that how to make coal cleaner has become a very important matter.

China is planning to build the world's largest and most efficient green energy system in the coming decades, using green energy to replace fossil energy, which accounts for around 85 percent of China's total energy consumption, Lin said.

Shaanxi has rich energy resources and is an important coal base, and an important pillar for China's green development. In 2020, raw coal output at the province's major industrial firms hit 679 million tons, accounting for 17.7 percent of the country's total, while the province's crude oil output totaled 26.94 million tons, making up 13.8 percent of the national total, the Economic Daily newspaper reported Tuesday.

Shaanxi is actively promoting the development, promotion and application of technologies for pollution and carbon reduction, and plans to build technological infrastructure for carbon dioxide capture, utilization and storage, said the Economic Daily report, citing an interview with Liu Guozhong, the Party chief of Shaanxi .

Through the implementation of clean and low-carbon coal-fired power transformation, the proportion of installed capacity of renewable energy power generation reached 33 percent in Shaanxi, the report said.  

In 2020, the share of coal-fired power in China's total energy mix fell below 50 percent for the first time, with non-fossil energy accounting for 34 percent of the country's power output, according to Fitch Ratings.

Global Times