Lianghuai Coal Base, the first 100 million-tonne coal base on stream in China, said on Friday its output would reach 120 million tonnes this year.
Lianghuai Coal Base, located in eastern Anhui Province, is among the 13 100 million-tonne coal bases the country had planned to build since 2004.The other 12 are still under construction.
Also on Friday, the coal base changed its name Huainan Mining Group into Lianghuai Coal Power Base, as its power generation capacity had increased from 4 million kilowatts in 2000 to more than 13 million kilowatts this year.
"It took us more than five years to develop the base," said Wang Yuan, board chairman of Huainan Mining Group which runs the base. He said the base had 25.2 billion tonnes of proven coal resources, which accounted for 45 percent of the total in east China.
By 2010, the total output of the 13 coal bases was estimated to hit 2.24 billion tonnes, accounting for 86 percent of the nation's total, said Wang Xianzheng, head of China National Coal Association (CNCA).
"For the first ten months, the output (at Lianghuai) reached 96.99 million tonnes. It could be 120 million tonnes for the whole year," said Fang Junshi, an official with the National Energy Commission (NEC).
China is the world's top producer and consumer of coal. About two thirds of the energy the country used was provided by coal.
To meet growing home demand and fuel the economy, the country would possibly become a net coal importer in 2008, according to a report released by Tian Shuhua, a researcher with China Galaxy Securities.
The country became a net coal importer for the first time in the first quarter of 2007. But for the whole of 2007, it was a net exporter.
However, the energy commission official said other planned large-scale coal bases could hardly all follow Lianghuai to become power bases because most of them lack water resources.
He estimated that by 2010, coal output at Lianghuai would increase to 150 million tonnes and power capacity to more than 30 million kilowatts.
(Xinhua News Agency December 5, 2008)