中国气候变化信息网 China Climate Change Info-Net

Illustration: Sarene Chan

（2014-09-22）The threat of climate change is driving China and the US - frequent rivals and the world's two largest greenhouse-gas emitters - to collaborate on dozens of potential clean-energy breakthroughs.

In research laboratories on opposite sides of the Pacific Ocean, more than 1,100 Chinese and American scientists are engaged in a joint programme marrying public and private money and talent. Among the US companies teamed with Chinese partners are Dow Chemical, Duke Energy and Ford Motor.

The cooperation contrasts with the two nations' longstanding differences over a range of issues, including the terms of a global treaty on climate change. While US President Barack Obama plans to join other world leaders in New York tomorrow for a UN climate summit, Chinese President Xi Jinping won't be there. Nor will Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, the third largest emitter.

The diplomatic inaction means that advances in technology may represent the planet's best hope for avoiding runaway warming. Innovations from the US-China brainstorming could spread to developing countries, allowing the world's fastest- growing nations to avoid repeating the advanced economies' fossil-fuel dependence.

"What can be more effective than the two largest emitters of CO2, or greenhouse gases, going at it together, arm-in-arm?" asked James Wood, director of advanced coal technology research for the US-China Clean Energy Research Centre at West Virginia University. "It sends some signals to people in the world that it can be solved and these are the two giants that can do it."

The low-budget cooperation on everything from energy-efficient buildings to new lithium-sulfur vehicle batteries is a rare bright spot in the Sino-US relationship. Tensions have risen this year over the South China Sea and China's treatment of foreign multinational corporations.

The research centre, now in its fourth year, has no physical headquarters. It's a virtual facility with advanced coal, vehicle and building-efficiency programmes running 88 separate projects. Each brings together teams of American and Chinese specialists to work on a specific problem or technology.

The centre is one of several overlapping US-China efforts to promote clean energy or environmental improvement.

Partnerships between the US and China "will set the tone for the world", Bill Gates, co-founder and former chairman of Microsoft, said recently.

One joint programme is bringing Oakland, California-based BrightSource Energy's solar-thermal-power technology to a demonstration project in Qinghai province.

A second helped China last year enact its first rural energy-efficiency building code, opening the door to halving energy usage in a residential footprint equal to the entire US housing sector.

A third linked Boeing, Honeywell International, PetroChina and Air China in a demonstration flight of a Boeing 747 powered by a mix of biofuels and regular jet fuel.

Perhaps the costliest undertaking is a commercial endeavour that evolved into US-China collaboration.

Seattle-based Summit Power Group plans to build a coal-gasification plant on a site near Odessa, Texas, which would strip carbon from coal through a chemical process, producing less pollution than traditional coal-burning plants. The resulting carbon dioxide would be used to coax trapped oil from ageing reservoirs and to produce fertiliser.

Summit anticipates completing a roughly US$2 billion loan with the Export-Import Bank of China in the spring of 2015 and beginning operations in 2018, several years behind schedule. The Chinese loan, conditioned on the involvement of a Chinese contractor, offered better terms than other potential financing, said Eric Redman, Summit's CEO.

"In this case, you have a lot of Chinese money and Chinese engineering expertise going into helping the US put a lot of the US carbon emissions underground," Redman said.

Though its total greenhouse-gas emissions continue to rise, China has reduced the amount of carbon it generates per unit of gross domestic product by almost 20 per cent and is expected to seek additional reductions.

Despite its notoriously foul air, China by some measures already has done more to address climate change than has the US. Under Xi, China has introduced seven pilot cap-and-trade programmes, covering roughly one-third of its US$9.3 trillion economy, and plans to establish a national system in 2016.

China's US$54.2 billion investment in renewable energy last year was 50 per cent larger than that of the US, according to data compiled by Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

"They're serious about climate," said former Treasury secretary Henry Paulson, who secured an earlier environmental partnership under president George W.Bush.

Though there have been hiccups - joint estimates of China's potential shale-gas reserves were stymied by the government's treatment of geological data as a "state secret" - by July, Obama boasted: "We have significantly enhanced our cooperation on climate change in the past year."

Still, this is no Manhattan Project. The research centre's five-year budget amounts to just US$150 million, divided between American and Chinese money. The US Energy Department is also kicking in US$450 million for the Texas coal-gasification plant.

Yet programme officials and their corporate partners say the value of the research dwarfs the modest spending.

The programme has taken on some of the toughest clean-energy questions, including the search for ways to capture carbon from power-plant emissions and store them underground.

Heliostats collect energy in the Mojave Desert. Photo: Reuters

"It's smart leveraging of public money for larger purposes," says David Sandalow, a former Energy Department official who was an architect of the US-China effort. "This is the right size" to start the research centre.

For Dow Chemical, joining the US-China Clean Energy Research Centre offered a chance to develop connections in China and collaborate with top scientific talent in US national laboratories. The company is developing improvements to a latex-based "cool roof" material aimed at reducing the cooling needs of buildings.

Dow is closing in on ways to make the rooftop coatings reflect up to 75 per cent of sunlight, which would double their effectiveness in cutting cooling bills, says Greg Bergtold, global research director for Dow's building solutions unit.

"It's not sexy, but it actually works," Bergtold says. "In both countries, we've seen an ability to move the needle both in carbon emissions and the energy demands of buildings."

As the research centre nears its December 2015 expiration, officials are weighing a more ambitious second phase. Details are expected to be on the agenda in November when Obama travels to China for an Asian summit and private meetings with Xi.

The need for action is only growing more evident, according to the UN official heading the world body's climate work.

Unless supplies of "low-carbon or no-carbon energy" were tripled or quadrupled, heat waves that now occurred once every 20 years would become every-other-year phenomena, said Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN's Intragovernmental Panel on Climate Change.