China's Shenhua in Talks with CNNC, CGN on Stakes in Nuclear Projects
China's Shenhua Group is in talks with leading Chinese nuclear developers on taking stakes in domestic nuclear projects, as the country's biggest coal producer diversifies into cleaner forms of energy, Shenhua President Zhang Yuzhuo said on Wednesday.
Shenhua Group, state-owned parent of Shanghai and Hong Kong-listed China Shenhua Energy, has been cutting coal production in a bid to shore up prices, which have plunged as a result of declining demand and a huge domestic supply glut.
The nuclear companies Shenhua is in talks with include China National Nuclear Corp (CNNC) and China General Nuclear Power Corp (CGN), Zhang said.
Shenhua Energy saw its net profit fall 56.9 percent in 2015. It produced 280.9 million tonnes of coal over the year, down 8.4 percent on 2014, and expects output to fall a further 0.3 percent this year, it said in its results filing last week.
Zhang said the company was dealing with a transformation in China's energy structure in which coal use would decline. The company has built 6.2 gigawatts of wind power capacity and 182 megawatts of solar power and is developing geothermal energy.
"Among big Chinese companies, when it comes to developing clean and renewable energies, we are not lagging behind at all," he said.
"We are hoping that in 20 or 30 years, we can bring down the costs of non-fossil fuel energies and at the same time raise the scale of construction, and during this process, allow fossil fuels and non-fossil fuels to be harmonised and provide mutual support," he added.
He said the company was also at the forefront of efforts to make coal cleaner. It has installed low-emission technology at all its 22 coal-fired power generators in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region, amounting to 10 gigawatts of capacity, and had made progress on commercialising technologies aimed at capturing climate-warming carbon dioxide emissions.
Zhang was speaking at a ceremony to mark 20 years of cooperation between China and the International Energy Agency (IEA).
"A few years ago we said China coal might peak, and I believe it might now have peaked," Fatih Birol, director of the IEA, told Reuters.
Sun Longde, vice president of China's top oil and gas producer PetroChina (PCCYF), told the conference his company was forecasting the country's energy consumption would peak by 2035, adding the share of coal in China's total energy mix would eventually fall to around a third, from around two thirds now.
(Reporting by David Stanway)
