Energy sector to get lion's share of R&D spending Options

[Mid-Night_Sun]

Energy sector to get lion's share of R&D spending
12TH FIVE-YEAR PLAN
Stephen Chen
Feb 10, 2011
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The energy sector will get the bulk of the mainland's science and technology investment, according to a draft of the Ministry of Science and Technology's five-year plan for 2011-2015.

Although it is just a draft and subject to the approval of the National People's Congress meeting next month, Minister Dr Wan Gang has already inverted the hourglass of the plan by including more than a dozen research and development (R&D) deals with US partners that will require a total investment of more than US$10 billion.

Most of the money will go to clean-energy sectors such as nuclear, wind and solar power. With that much money at his disposal, Wan hopes Chinese and American scientists and engineers, the world's two largest emitting countries, can achieve technological breakthroughs to lessen global dependency on oil.

But Wan's interest in clean energy should not be overemphasised, because when he addressed more than 4,000 of the mainland's best scientific minds at the annual meeting of the China Association for Science and Technology in November in Fuzhou , Fujian , Wan promised the fossil fuel sector two-thirds of the R&D investment in energy for the next five years, whatever that allocation turns out to be.

He said deep-sea and deep-earth exploration for fossil fuels and mineral resources would rival the clean-energy sector and see the biggest growth of R&D funds.

In the clean-energy sector, although wind and solar power has received most support from environmentalists and media attention, the nuclear energy industry will quietly get more of the R&D budget.

Professor Gu Zhongmao , scientific adviser to the China Institute of Atomic Energy, said Beijing would probably write into the five-year plan the construction of a factory to recycle commercially spent fuel and a full-scale fast reactor. The cost of each project would exceed 100 billion yuan (HK$118 billion).

Because it has never done this before, tens of thousands of chemists, physicists and engineers will be hired to produce, among other things, flying nuclei - which operate thousands of times faster than today's inefficient nuclear reactors - and radioactive bath tubes - which are filled with chemicals that burn and clean up nuclear waste from those reactors.

But a considerable amount of the money, if not most of it, will be used to buy technology and equipment from other countries, such as France, because it would take China at least a decade to develop its own if it had to start from scratch.

"There is not much R&D left to be done in wind energy because wind turbines nowadays are already approaching the ceiling of mechanical efficiency. Solar energy has greater room for improvement, but its application in China is limited by wasteful land use," Gu said.

"Though nuclear power is not entirely clean at this stage, it has the technical and practical potential to fully replace oil and coal in China. We need and deserve the biggest investment for R&D."

In July, the first experimental fast reactor was fired up in a Beijing suburb, which will pave the way to build the recycling plant and the power station. But even by the most optimistic estimate, fast reactors in China could not begin replacing coal-fired power plants until 2050. To sustain economic growth and the energy and material demand of a 1.3 billion population and growing, China would need considerably more fossil fuels and natural resources.

One solution is digging even deeper. Most of the oil reserves found are in the continental crust, which is shallow. But if you believe some theories about how hydrocarbons were formed by heat and pressure, there might be an ocean of crude oil near the earth's mantle more than 160 kilometres underground.

That is where Beijing is looking, according to the five-year plan.

Professor Zhang Jianfeng , deputy director of the department of oil and natural gas resources under the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Geology and Geophysics, said that if Wan's promise was to be trusted, most of the R&D investment in deep earth would be used on developing highly sensitive exploration equipment such as seismometers.

Zhang said that even the best equipment developed by overseas firms could no longer meet the extreme requirements of China's oil exploration efforts. Lots of problems have occurred in the field, so to reach the oil and mineral treasures buried at a depth that other countries haven't even fathomed, China must develop its own deep-earth exploration devices, he said. "The pressure of energy and resources shortages is pushing us into uncharted depths of the earth," he said. "For deep-earth adventures, no tool is better than your own tool."

Song Haibin , a researcher at the institute specialising in deep-sea exploration, said that it had more or less mapped the distribution of oil, natural gas, methane hydrate and mineral deposits in the East and South China Sea floors through a series of intensive explorations in the past few years, including the world's deepest dive by a manned submarine, which put a Chinese flag on the basin of the South China Sea last year.

"Next we need to figure out how to get these babies out," Song said.

One big obstacle in deep-sea oil drilling, collecting methane hydrate and excavating minerals is underwater currents, and an important part of the five-year plan is to collect data on how marine waters set and change their courses, Song said.

Different layers of seawater flow at different speeds, and the turbulence between these layers, can be powerful enough to snap a submarine. In the next five years, scientists hope to mark out most "no dive zones" in the South China Sea and western Pacific to pave the way for deep-sea oil rigs and excavation platforms.

Dr Sun Fuquan , director of the Institute of Comprehensive Development under the Chinese Academy of Science and Technology for Development and a drafter of the five-year plan's science and technology section, said that Wan's emphasis on energy and natural resources was in line with the Communist Party's political goals. "The carrot of the five-year plan is economic development with maximum sustainability and minimum environmental impact," Sun said. "Scientists and engineers will go for it."



http://www.scmp.com/portal/site/SCMP/menui...hina&s=News

This post has been edited by Mid-Night_Sun: Feb 11 2011, 05:21 PM

[InitialDJay]

none of these renewable energy is 100% efficient, including nuclear power. i wonder if china is interesting in advance research like extracting thermonuclear fusion or gamma-anti particles. if not, then china is not optimism over the cloudy project. that is very wasteful without china human capital and resources.

but anyway, china future in R&D spending will affect many of my classmates, so i'm hopeful that they can keep this up.

[KraterosHellas]

good idea. oil is not worth fighting for. it's time to develop alternate ways..