County in Shaanxi in a Deep Hole as Mining Bubble Pops - Caixin | Shenmu rolled in cash when prices for its coal soared in recent years. Now private bankers are fleeing and the local government is in a bind. A financial crisis triggered by falling coal prices is brewing in Shenmu County, in the northwestern province of Shaanxi. Construction projects have been halted, universal health care has run into payment problems and many private bankers have disappeared in the last few months, all indications that another story of legendary development is now just a bubble bursting. The richest county in the province, Shenmu is blessed with abundant coal reserves. Buoyed by rising prices in the last decade, Shenmu enjoyed the birth of a vibrant mining industry. Accompanying this were rampant private lending, skyrocketing real estate prices and government largesse in social spending. The county's 400,000 residents were the happy recipients of China's first universal health-care scheme and free education for 15 years, six more years than the national minimum. All of this came to a sudden stop when coal prices went south two years ago ... On July 26, Lei Zhengxi, the county's Communist Party secretary, was removed from his post.

China polysilicon reforms will amount to a cull, manufacturers warn - PV Tech |
Moves by Beijing to reform the polysilicon manufacturing sector will result in a cull some of the largest producers have warned.The Chinese government plans to support an increase in technological advancement in the sector that will leave less efficient manufacturers behind and “nurture a batch of internationally competitive producers”, according to Reuters. Chinese sources in the industry expect the move to ultimately cut the country’s production capacity in half. “Most producers will be eliminated rather than acquired. This may sound cruel, but is the reality as they are technologically uncompetitive," Lu Jinbiao, a senior official at China's GCL-Poly Energy, told Reuters. Lu was backed up by Ma Haitian, deputy secretary general of the Silicon Industry of China Nonferrous Metals Industry Association (CNMIA), who said: “Large amounts of ineffective, high-cost production capacity will exit the market.” A CNMIA report released last month revealed that in the first half of 2013 just six companies were actively producing polysilicon while 43 firms left their plants closed.

• China's solar energy overhaul to knock out laggards - The Age | Three quarters of China's solar-grade polysilicon producers face closure as Beijing looks to overhaul a bloated and inefficient industry, resulting in fewer but better companies to compete against Germany's Wacker Chemie and South Korea's OCI Co. The polysilicon sector, which has around 40 companies employing 30,000 people and has received investment of 100 billion yuan ($A18 billion), suffers from low quality and chronic over-capacity as local governments poured in money to feed a fast-growing solar panel industry, for which polysilicon is a key feedstock. Demand for solar panels has eased since the global financial crisis, forcing governments worldwide to slash solar power subsidies, and leaving China sitting on idle capacity and mounting losses.

China Fracking Quake-Prone Province Shows Zeal for Gas - Bloomberg | China won’t let earthquakes hinder its quest for energy. Companies such as Royal Dutch Shell Plc (RDSA) and China National Petroleum Corp. are starting to drill for gas and oil in shale rock in Sichuan, the nation’s most seismically active province, a process geologists say raises the risk of triggering quakes.“For the Sichuan basin, earthquakes are a problem for shale gas and shale oil production because of the tectonic conditions,” said Shu Jiang, a professor at the University of Utah’s Energy & Geoscience Institute in Salt Lake City. “The siting of the wells could cause some artificial earthquakes.”...A key step in producing shale gas is hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, where millions of gallons of pressurized water, chemicals and sand are injected underground to shatter rock and release trapped gas. Afterward, some of the liquids return to the surface and often are disposed of in underground wells.

• Oil companies begin 'fracking' in China’s most dangerous earthquake zone - RT | The Chinese want to join the shale gas revolution, even if it means drilling for oil in China’s earthquake hot bed in the Sichuan region, where nearly 70,000 died in an earthquake in 2008. ...Europe's largest oil company plans to invest $1 billion per year in China’s shale gas industry, as part of its goal to increase global output to four million barrels of oil and gas by 2017-2018, up from current levels of 3.3 million. Drilling for oil in the Longmenshan mountain range, where India and Asia meet, could increase tremors in the already highly-sensitive area....There is strong correlative evidence between deep underground wells and nearby earthquakes, both in the US and China.

China’s Nicaragua Canal could benefit all of Asia - Interfax | ...With the likelihood the US Gulf will eventually export significant quantities of LNG – and possibly shale oil – HKND’s chairman Wang Jing has indicated one of the main drivers behind the development of the new canal is the prospect of attracting oil and LNG tanker traffic that is unable to transit the Panama Canal, or would opt for a shorter route to Asia. The planned Nicaraguan canal would be able to accommodate the world’s largest LNG and oil tankers, which cannot pass through the Panama Canal. Even after an ongoing expansion of the Panama route is completed in 2014, Q-flex and Q-max class LNG carriers will still be too large, and the expanded waterway will also be inaccessible to Very Large and Ultra Large Crude Carriers.

The Rise of Rubber Takes Toll - Yale 360 |  In one of China’s most biodiverse regions, the spread of rubber plantations to supply the country’s burgeoning automobile industry is carving up habitat and harming watersheds and tropical forest ecosystems. ... Today more than one fifth of Xishuangbanna is planted in rubber, both by individual villagers and large companies, and the noxious smell of rubber processing hangs in the air on Jinhong’s rural outskirts. But those are the least of the problems created as monoculture rubber plantations have replaced exceptionally biodiverse forests and contributed to a host of emerging environmental problems. These include topsoil erosion, rising stresses on watersheds and hydrological cycles, and reduced rates of carbon sequestration, according to scientific studies. The plantations also carve up the habitat of native animals like Asian elephants and white-cheeked gibbons, according to a 2012 study by the scientists R. Edward Grumbine and Xu Jianchu.

Australian PWCS terminals ship 2.6 million mt coal to China in July - Platts | Australia's Port Waratah Coal Services shipped 2.6 million mt of coal to China, the company said Thursday. The coal terminal operator achieved its highest monthly throughput last month at 10.4 million mt despite intermittent strikes. China was the destination for 25% of coal shipments from the PWCS terminals at Newcastle port in July, compared with 28% in June on a lower throughput figure of 9.24 million mt, according to an exports report from the company.

State EIS on Cherry Point coal-exports facility to consider "end use" coal burning in China as well as regional rail impacts - The News Tribune / The Olympian | An environmental review of a proposed coal-export facility at Cherry Point will take into account pollutants emitted by the facility, rail traffic carrying coal to the facility, and also the impact on greenhouse gases from coal burning in China, India and other export destinations.  The scope of environmental review was announced Wednesday by the Department of Ecology, Whatcom County and Army Corps of Engineers, which are co-leading the environmental review. The broad look at “end use” impacts of off-shore coal burning is unprecedented for Ecology, which alone is insisting on that review under its administering of the State Environmental Policy Act.