Through intense cross-sectoral cooperation, north China's Shanxi Province has further processed industrial pollutions by turning them into useful products and clean energy.
The Jinnan Steel Group in Shanxi's Linfen City needs to use 7,500 tons of coke and 19,000 tone of melted iron to produce 24,000 tons of steel every day. In this process, 2.76 million cubic meters of converter gas will be generated.
While for a local coking factory, it will produce more than 9,000 tons of coke every day, along with 3.78 million cubic meters of coke oven gas.
Since these waste gases cannot be emitted directly, then how to deal with them?
"Traditionally, we would heat up and burn the coke oven gas to generate electricity. This is highly energy-consuming with massive emissions. Now, we'll send the extra coke oven gas to chemical plant," said Shi Yunpeng, director of Jinnan Steel Group's Liheng coking factory.
In the chemical plant, these waste gases were changed into useful products, such as glycol and liquefied natural gas.
"After chemical process treatment such as compression, purification, separation and purification, coke oven gas and converter gas will turn into 300,000 tons of ethylene glycol and 150,000 tons of liquefied natural gas products per year. Such treatment will also reduce 1.36 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions from the upstream industry," said Han Tingjie, chief despatcher of production technology department with Shanxi Woneng Chemical Technology Co., Ltd.
The pollution can also become hydrogen, which will later replace coke to heat up blast furnaces for making iron.
"After hydrogen smelting, this blast furnace can cut coke by 40,000 tons per year. So three blast furnaces can reduce 120,000 tons of coke and 330,000 tons of carbon dioxide emissions every year," said Ding Chao, person in charge of Jinnan iron mill's No.3 blast furnace.
For now, Shanxi's steel and coking industries have said goodbye to high pollution and high energy consumption, heading towards an environment-friendly future.
Coal-rich Shanxi Province steps up environment-friendly low-carbon circular growth
With the beginning of the cotton harvest season, northwest China's Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region is anticipating higher yields from advancements in agricultural technology and mechanization.
Xinjiang is the largest production area of high-quality commodity cotton in China. The 2.47-million-hectare cotton growing area in the region has produced more than 5 million tons of cotton for six consecutive years.
The northern and southern parts of the vast autonomous region have different climates, different cotton varieties and also different growing periods. Currently, cotton picking started two weeks ago in northern Xinjiang, while the harvesting has just begun in the southern areas.
In Tumxuk City, located in southern Xinjiang, cotton farmers are using all-in-one harvesters to help them pick cotton, separate the flowers from the stalks and pack them into bundles.
"In the past, we picked the cotton manually. It took us more than a month to pick 100 mu (6.67 hectares) of cotton, and the cost reached 1,000 yuan per mu (about 2,106 U.S. dollars per hectare). Now, we use domestically produced cotton pickers to gather them, which have high efficiency and low cost. It now takes less than a day to harvest my 100 mu of cotton, with a cost less than 200 yuan per mu," said Turaxun Samat, a local farmer.
This year, Xinjiang has vigorously promoted the new cotton planting technology of drip irrigation under the mulching film at the appropriate emergence temperature, replacing the old method of irrigating before sowing. The technology can greatly improve the emergence rate while also saving water resources.
In addition, the precision sowing supported by BeiDou Navigation Satellite System and remote sensing monitoring by the agricultural big data platform have also been widely adopted across Xinjiang, contributing to the growth of cotton output.
"This year, a total of 1,057,800 mu (about 70,520 hectares) of cotton have been planted in Tumxuk City, and the unginned cotton yield is estimated at 451.4 kilograms per mu, an average increase of 11.7 kilograms per mu over the previous year," said Chen Yongsen, a member of the leadership of the city's Bureau of Agriculture and Rural Affairs.
The cotton harvesting in Xinjiang is expected to end in early November.
Xinjiang enters cotton harvest season with higher yield expected
