China doubles down on coal with rapid roll-out of new railway track to the world’s largest deposit

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·         257km line from Zhundong open pit to Urumqi will increase the mine’s transport capacity to more than 100 million tonnes a year

·         Tight construction deadline and obstacles such as protecting wildlife habitats and extreme Gobi Desert temperatures proved challenging for the team

The Zhundong open-pit field has 390 billion tonnes of coal. Now, a new track will boost its transport capacity by over 90 per cent. Photo: Weibo

In just a year, China has completed the construction of a new track to nearly double the rail transport capacity of the world’s largest coal deposit in Xinjiang.

To the northeast of Xinjiang’s capital city Urumqi, the Zhundong open-pit field has 390 billion tonnes of coal, according to a report on Tuesday by Science and Technology Daily, an official paper run by the Ministry of Science and Technology.

This estimated reserve dwarfs that of the North Antelope Rochelle mine in the United States, once the biggest coal mine in the world, by over 200 times.

The low-sulphur, high-energy coal from the Zhundong deposit alone can support China’s energy demands for more than a century, according to an estimate by Chinese researchers in 2016.

With the help of machines powered by AI and 5G technologies, the Zhundong coal mine produced nearly 150 million tonnes of coal last year, contributing to half the total output of the Xinjiang, according to Guangming Daily. Photo: Weibo

The 257km (153-mile) track from Zhundong to Urumqi – about the distance between New York State and Washington DC – would increase the mine’s outgoing rail transport capacity by over 90 per cent to more than 100 million tonnes a year.

Rail engineers told Science and Technology Daily they had encountered many challenges in building the new electricity-powered track against an extremely tight deadline.

“[But] after the completion of this project, the blockage problem that has troubled the railway for many years has been completely eliminated, and the transport channel capacity has been greatly improved,” Huang Jian, deputy director of the freight department of China Railway Urumqi Bureau Group Corporation, was quoted by the state newspaper as saying.

“It is a fundamental change for us to efficiently organise the supply of goods and better serve the production of enterprises along the line.”