Baotou to build air quality monitoring network

By Liu Yufen (chinadaily.com.cn)

Updated: 2014-02-20

The city of Baotou, North China’s Inner Mongolia autonomous region, will invest a total of 3 billion yuan ($494.7 million) towards an air pollution prevention and control project and an automatic monitoring network covering the whole city, according to the Baotou municipal government.

Baogang Group, one of China’s leading steel enterprises, will start the second stage of dust source control in the near future with support from the local government. In this stage, the group will make obsolete all shaft furnaces and old pellet machines in iron smelting works and complete the reconstruction of four blast furnace feeding systems and electrostatic precipitators.

A reconstruction project aiming for stricter air pollutant emission standards will be launched by the city’s air pollution prevention and control project, with a focus on the steel and thermal power generation industries.

The city will also renovate heavy pollution enterprises around Baogang Group, shutdown 307 coal yards along highways and railways, and crackdown on 1,170 small-size coal-fire boilers.

New enterprises that contribute to air pollution are forbidden within and around the city.

The municipality seeks to eliminate backwards production capacity one year prior to the 12th Five-Year Plan’s goal and become part of the third batch of demonstration cities for energy conservation and emissions reduction. According to the government, it will work to remarkably improve air quality in a period of three to five years.

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