What are people’s views on coal chemical industry?

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Coal chemical industry was the biggest highlight of China’s petrochemical industry during the 12th Five-Year Plan period. During the 13th Five-Year Plan period, China should not relax its macro-control over modern coal chemical industry; it is necessary to prioritize demonstration projects and raise the standards for improvement in management, technology, and investment efficiency, in order to transform the coal chemical industry from a follower model to a leader model. Modern coal chemical industry must, on the basis of a thorough review of the development experiences during the 12th Five-Year Plan period, pursue a new path of breakthrough and transformative development. “\"Breakthrough\" means that modern coal chemical industry must rely on technological innovation to achieve advancements in high-end technologies. It is necessary to overcome some global challenges, seize a number of technological advantages that put China at the forefront of the world, and create new high grounds for China’s coal chemical industry. “\"Transformation\" means that the development approach of modern coal chemical industry should shift from one based on scale of input factors to one focused on quality and efficiency. It is necessary to rely on technological innovation to pursue a new path of development that features low resource consumption, high technical content, good quality and efficiency, as well as sustainability. This new path of \"breakthrough\" and \"transformation\" can be summarized as \"upgraded models, rational planning, advanced technology, and green sustainable development\". 　　The first is upgrade demonstration. It mainly aims to further consolidate and enhance China’s relative and absolute technical, economic, and equipment advantages in modern coal chemical industry through technological upgrades. This technological upgrade focuses mainly on five aspects: the first is the upgrade of advanced gasification technology. It is required to achieve high-value utilization of higher-grade coal and rational utilization of lower-grade coal, in order to comprehensively improve the level of clean, differentiated, and efficient utilization of coal ； The second is the upgrade of advanced synthesis technologies. Gas purification technology is more advanced, synthetic catalysts are more efficient, and the synthesis process is more optimized in terms of temperature, pressure, and efficiency ； Third is the upgrade of key core equipment technologies. Strive to achieve self-sufficiency in large-scale gasification, air separation, purification, synthesis, separation equipment, as well as key pumps and valves, in order to provide equipment support for industrial development ； Fourth is the technological upgrading for the differentiation of end products. Break the current trend of convergence among end products by developing new technologies that make these products more premium and differentiated ； Fifth is the upgrade in cost advantages. To create more, greater, and stronger economic cost advantages in the competition between modern coal chemical industry and the petrochemical industry. 　　The second is rational layout. “During the 13th Five-Year Plan period, in planning the \"pilot\" projects, it is essential to adhere to the three principles of being close to raw materials, close to markets, and located within chemical industrial parks. It is also necessary to follow the planning requirements of acting in accordance with one’s capabilities, taking into account available resources, and respecting the environmental carrying capacity. Additionally, the technical characteristics of large-scale operations, significant advantages through clustering, a rational industrial chain, and prominent product differentiation should be upheld. Through rational planning during the 13th Five-Year Plan period, China’s development of modern coal chemical industry should be kept under proper control in terms of overall volume, its layout should be further optimized, and its technical advantages should be highlighted. Efforts should be made to establish a number of large-scale, comprehensive modern coal chemical parks and bases that meet international standards and possess superior environmental protection features as well as higher management efficiency. 　　Third is high-end technology. “During the 13th Five-Year Plan period, it is necessary to further develop the two advantages of coal-based production at the beginning of the process and chemical processing at the end of it. “The advantage of the \"coal-based\" approach lies in the use of advancements and optimizations in gasification technology to make the processing methods downstream of syngas more flexible and diverse, thereby enabling the use of coal-derived syngas in the production of synthetic ammonia, natural gas, and hydrogen ； Multi-product processes are formed with methanol, olefins, aromatics, etc., opening up broader avenues for carbon chemistry. “The advantage of \"transforming the end products\" lies in using technological innovation to quickly overcome the problem of similar structures among current end products, and to accelerate the creation of a new landscape characterized by higher-end and more differentiated end products. “During the 13th Five-Year Plan period, we will strive for breakthroughs at the advanced level through sophisticated processing technologies such as those for producing olefins from coal, aromatics from coal, and ethylene glycol from coal. We aim to make significant advances in production technologies related to new chemical materials, engineering plastics, high-performance fibers, and high-performance coatings, thereby contributing to reducing China’s trade deficit in the petrochemical sector. 　　Fourth is green sustainable development. At present, a major constraint on the development of modern coal chemical industry is environmental emission issues. “During the 13th Five-Year Plan period, it is essential to focus on three key tasks: First, building on demonstration projects, it is necessary to establish as soon as possible advanced and reasonable, comprehensive emission standards for wastewater, waste gas, and solid waste in modern coal chemical industries. By utilizing an advanced and rational system of technical standards, efforts should be made to improve the level of green development in such projects ； Secondly, significant efforts must be made to overcome the technical challenges related to high-salt wastewater and the utilization of carbon dioxide emissions, so as to use clean and reliable technologies to address fundamentally the prominent environmental emission issues that currently hinder the development of modern coal chemical industry ； Third, it is necessary to establish an efficient and strict environmental protection supervision system; in particular, through a centralized online supervision system for chemical industrial parks and modern coal chemical bases, China can create benchmarks and models for the green and sustainable development of its modern coal chemical industry. 　　Through new approaches of \"breakthrough\" and \"transformation\", during the 13th Five-Year Plan period, China’s modern coal chemical industry will take new steps toward steady growth, on the basis of controlling total output, improving technologies, and reducing emissions. By 2020, it is expected that China’s coal-to-oil production capacity will reach 12 million tons per year, coal-to-natural gas production capacity will reach 20 billion cubic meters per year, coal-to-olefins production capacity will reach 16 million tons per year, coal-to-aromatics production capacity will reach 1 million tons per year, and coal-to-ethylene glycol production capacity will reach 6 million tons per year. It further optimizes the proportion of modern coal chemical industry in the industrial structure of China’s petroleum and chemical industry, thereby increasing its contribution.