How to Meet the Clean Air Challenge

Similar to the process of producing clean water, one method China uses to attempt to reduce chronic smog pollution moves dirty air through a filtration system.

     In Beijing, a Dutch invention cleans air using a 23-foot, cylindrical filtration tower powered by electricity from a coal-fired power plant. A 300-foot tower surrounded by coated greenhouses in Xian, Shaanxi province, is experimenting with a more complex process. In daylight hours, solar radiation heats polluted air in the greenhouses before it rises in the tower through a series of purifying filters and is released into a 3.86 square mile area. Thus far, the Xian tower, when treating severely polluted air, especially in winter when coal provides heat in the area, shows only a 15% reduction in the fine small particles most hazardous to health. Yet, Xian's developers have an ambitious plan to construct 1,640-foot anti-pollution towers, each surrounded by 11.6 square miles of greenhouses, in other Chinese cities.

     Based on the Australian study mentioned in the earlier post, "Priority: Eliminate generating electricity from fossil fuels," coal-fueled power plants are the major source of pollution. These air filtration towers would seem to do the most good, if they were located in the vicinity of power plants.

     Startups and traditional automakers throughout the world race to produce the electric cars that promise to eliminate a source of pollution, the fossil fuels that power today's cars and trucks. The challenge to up the percentage of electric passenger cars from less than 1% on the world's roads today to at least 33% by 2040 involves financing, designing, engineering, manufacturing, charging stations, searching for the lithium used in batteries, and marketing. China is the industry's acknowledged leader with Tesla in the U.S. and European automakers also in the hunt.

     Although China is expected to continue to import lithium from South America's Argentina-Chile-Bolivia Belt (See the earlier post, "Technology's Hard Sell and the Public's Role in the Lithium-ion Battery Industry."), it has its own domestic supply. In the cold, thin air high in China's mountains between the Tibet Autonomous Region and the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, mining in Chaerhan Salt Lake is on track to supply a plant that will produce 30,000 tons of lithium carbonate by 2020 or 2021 and eventually plants that produce 200,000 tons annually.

     China also has ideas for creating charging methods to keep electric cars on the road away from home. When driving long distances, drivers could visit automated swap stations to switch their dying batteries for new ones in three minutes, or they could call mobile vans to come and recharge their dying batteries in ten minutes. (I cannot help but recall the toxic nano particles a high school student found, when her summer intern project at the University of Wisconsin studied the effects of decomposing lithium batteries. See the earlier post, "The Challenge of New Technologies: Prepare to Think.") By requiring foreign auto dealers to sell only electric cars and to provide charging options, China is in a position to restrict entry into the world's biggest market.