21-07-04 The apparent contradiction between sustainable development on the one hand and the need for energy on the other is one of the biggest challenges facing China, which has been suffering both profound energy shortages and severe environmental deterioration.
We have been visiting the regions in the far west of China to take a look at the issues at close hand.

On the Karamay Mountain in Xinjiang, China's north-western border region, small pools of crude oil still bubble with natural gas erupting from within the rock. The oil pools burst open on their own volition more than forty years ago, persuading the government to begin exploration in the area.
From the peak of the mountain, one can see thousands of oil pumps working away at the wells drilled across the monocline containing China's fourth biggest oil field. Oil exploration and processing is being stepped up in the area, with a new expanded ethylene plant the first among a series of new petrochemical projects to begin construction in the near future, and plans for increased refining capacity already coming to fruition.

Crude production reached 10.6 mm tons last year, and that is set to rise to 11.1 mm tons in 2004.
"China's oil hopes lie in the West, and the West's hopes lie in Xinjiang, and Xinjiang's hopes lie in the Tarim Basin and Karamay," said Sun Zhiqiang, a local official and senior engineer with the Karamay city government, during a visit to the mountain.
The remote location and inhospitable climate (44 degrees centigrade during our visit to the region, and falling to 20 degrees below zero in the winter) mean that one of the age-old problems for traditional Chinese oil fields -- theft by local farmers and residents -- does not exist. There is the occasional plantation, but unlike Daqing in the northeast, which remains China's biggest oil field, this is a thinly populated region.

Karamay means "black oil" in the local Uygur Muslim language, but there are fewer ethnic minority residents here in a city and industry dominated first by the national Petroleum Bureau, and then by the state-owned oil giant, PetroChina. The name, however, could not be more appropriate. If the crude had not been found there in sufficient quantity, the city would never even have existed.
When the Politburo approved the decision to construct Karamay City in 1958, it was barren semi-desert. Now with a population of 340,000, its GDP is 80 % dependent on the oil industry, according to Sun Zhiqiang. 30,000 people are currently directly employed by the oil field, down from 150,000 after a recent period of restructuring, the official added.

It might be impolite to accuse a city government of being too dependent on an industry when it was, after all, set up for the specific purpose of serving that industry, and especially when its per capita GDP rate is said to be higher than that of Shanghai. However, the problems caused by the creation of industrial townships throughout China -- including the old mining towns in Shanxi and a number of oil and steel bases in the northeast -- have become increasingly clear in recent years.
The city of Fuxin, in Liaoning Province, is not only facing economic collapse, with a third of the population unemployed, but also literal, physical collapse as the passages in its exhausted coal mines begin to crumble.

The Chinese government has been talking more and more about the issue of stable, sustainable development in recent years, but with a nation growing increasingly desperate for oil and power, might the temptation to overexploit the resources in Xinjiang be too hard to resist?
Experts have already expressed their worries about excessive development of water resources in south-western China's Yunnan in order to feed the growing need for power in the east, and Xinjiang's fragile ecology might also suffer as industries move inland, closer to the coal and oil resources in the region.

An official with the regional Development Planning Commission, Yang Jixin, told that the difference between the traditional oil fields of north-eastern China and those in Xinjiang were simple, and had some bearing on the prospects of achieving sustainable development in the region.
"Our oil production areas have never been suitable for human habitation," he said. "Unlike the areas you talk about, like the northeast, where oil has been found in agricultural areas and have caused ecological damage, Xinjiang oil is all found in uninhabited areas." The implication is that in Xinjiang, with its forbidding climate and its sprawling, lifeless deserts, the environment could not possibly get any worse.