US, China put rifts aside for clean-energy research

WASHINGTON — The threat of climate change is driving China and the United States — frequent rivals and the world’s two largest greenhouse-gas emitters — to collaborate on dozens of potential clean-energy breakthroughs.

In research laboratories on opposite sides of the Pacific Ocean, more than 1,100 Chinese and American scientists are engaged in a joint programme marrying public and private money and talent.

The cooperation contrasts with the two nations’ long-standing differences over a range of issues, including intellectual property, human rights, cyberspying and, notably, the terms of a global treaty on climate change. While US President Barack Obama plans to join other world leaders in New York tomorrow for a United Nations climate summit, Chinese President Xi Jinping will not be there. Nor will Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, the third-largest emitter.

The diplomatic inaction means that advances in technology may represent the planet’s best hope for avoiding runaway warming. Innovations from the US-China brainstorming could spread to developing countries, allowing the world’s fastest-growing nations to avoid repeating the advanced economies’ fossil-fuel dependence.

“What can be more effective than the two largest emitters of CO2, or greenhouse gases, going at it together, arm-in-arm?” said Mr James Wood, director of advanced coal technology research for the US-China Clean Energy Research Center at West Virginia University. “It sends some signals to people in the world that it can be solved and these are the two giants that can do it.”

The low-budget cooperation on everything from energy-efficient buildings to new lithium-sulfur vehicle batteries is a rare bright spot in the Sino-US relationship. Tensions have also risen this year over the South China Sea and China’s treatment of foreign multinational corporations.

Now in its fourth year, the energy and environmental effort dates back to Mr Obama’s first visit to China in 2009, but got off to a slow start over issues including worries by US companies that their Chinese partners might pilfer trade secrets.

The research centre has no physical headquarters. Instead, it is a virtual facility with advanced coal, vehicle and building-efficiency programmes running 88 separate projects. Each brings together teams of American and Chinese specialists to work on a specific problem or technology.

The centre is one of several overlapping US-China efforts to promote clean energy or environmental improvement. One joint programme is bringing California-based BrightSource Energy’s concentrating solar thermal power technology to a demonstration project in China’s Qinghai province. A second helped China last year enact its first rural energy-efficiency building code, opening the door to halving energy usage in a residential footprint equal to the entire US housing sector.

The research centre’s five-year budget amounts to only US$150 million (S$190 million), divided between American and Chinese money. The US Energy Department is also kicking in US$450 million for the Texas coal-gasification plant. Yet, programme officials and their corporate partners say the value of the research dwarfs the modest spending. The programme has taken on some of the toughest clean-energy questions, including the search for ways to capture carbon from power-plant emissions and store them underground.

“It’s smart leveraging of public money for larger purposes,” said Mr David Sandalow, a former Energy Department official who was an architect of the US-China effort. “This is the right size” to start the research centre, he said.

As the centre nears its December 2015 expiration, officials are weighing a more ambitious second phase. Details are expected to be on the agenda in November when Mr Obama travels to China for an Asian summit and private meetings with Mr Xi. Bloomberg