According to the recent reports, China’s Wu’an, a country-level city administered as a part of Hebei province has ordered its ten major steel companies to operate at 50% of production capacity as a part of new measures to control pollution from Apr’18 to Sep’18. These new orders came shortly after China’s winter heating season ended in Mar’18.
The city has also directed its coking industry to reduce output by 25% over that period, while power and cement firms must cut production by around 20%.
The circular issued by the city has mentioned that along with output restriction, few companies like Wenfeng Steel has to close two rolling production lines whereas Longfengshan Casting has to shut down a 200 square meters sintering machine supporting 800 cubic meters of the blast furnace. It has also specified about blast furnaces and sintering machine production standards.
The city plans to invest 100 billion yuan in more than 1,000 sewage disposal nodes and treatment facilities, implement standards-compliant discharge, upgrade and standardize the task of eliminating fuel gas and bleaching within a time limit, ensure a significant reduction in pollution emissions, and achieve a significant improvement in pollution control.
The companies in the city have been given special directives not to add high-pollution and high-energy-consumption industrial projects that cannot directly implement coal-fired combustion as a major energy source.
The big picture in Hebei province
As per reports, Handan has an annual steelmaking capacity of about 113 MnT and is a heavily polluted steel hub and the only city in Hebei to see a rise in concentrations in 2017 of size PM 2.5 (Particulate Matter 2.5 microns) that are quite harmful for the human beings and may lead to respiratory diseases.
China’s biggest steel-producing city, Tangshan, also in Hebei, has also decided to extend production restrictions on steel mills beyond the end of the heating season. Hebei province produces nearly a quarter of China’s steel has said that it would set up an air quality punishment and reward system for its cities, counties, and districts.
As published in the Hebei province website, recent environmental inspections in the province had led to six iron and steel enterprises to close some of their facilities after their emissions permits were revoked and further 113 companies have been given three months to rectify violations discovered by the inspection teams.
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