Today（18 May, 2017）, AQSIQ has published the White Paper on Quality and Safety of Import and Export Commodity in 2016, which exposes the situation of import and export coal quality. The whole system has inspected 22,270 batches of import coal which weights 195.7326 million tons and worths 9.662 billion USD, increasing 7.56%, -7.79% and -24.81% respectively.
It shows that Chinese imported coal is from different 19 countries and regions, according to the sort by weight, the rank is Australia, Indonesia, North Korea, Mongolia, Russia, the Philippines and Canada. Last year, the unqualified import coal is totaled in 5,113 batches with 57.8397 million tons and values 3.056 billion USD, rising 41.24%, 4.04% and -15.46%. The failure rate of batch, weight and value is 22.96%, 29.56% and 31.63%.
The unqualified coal is mainly imported from North Korea, Russia, Australia, Indonesia, Canada, etc.
The White Paper revealed that totally 301 batches and 973.3 thousand tons of imported coal is not complied with environmental requirements. The unqualified points are mainly from five parameters: Mercury, Fluorine, Arsenic, Phosphorus, Sulfur.
It should be noted that the all the unqualified coal is anthracite imported from North Korea. There are two major reasons, firstly with the closed economy background, their anthracite is under centralized and closed management, the requirements of China coal import couldn’t be got by them owing to limited association with outside; secondly owing to their lack of testing facility and expertise, the normal coal quality testing couldn’t be implemented，especially on environmental parameters such as Mercury.
White Paper pointed out, for this problem of current import coal, with the reformation of supply-side, domestic coal industry made a great progess in cutting overcapacity and reducing production scale in 2016, but domestic market appeared at unbalance supply and demand, since May 2016, the amount of import coal has increased actively. “Cutting overcapacity coal in China is beneficial of Indonesia, Australia, North Korea, Russia etc.” Reported by the media.
Therefore, under the premise of observing the International TBT &SPS, the inspection & quarantine bureau should enhance the research in quarantine measures for import coal to cement macro-controlling fruit in national coal for production capacity. They will monitor closely on environmental parameters of import coal, which will offer sufficient database support for the government to develop more appropriate environment requirements.
According to recent working progress, the unqualified coal is mainly caused by unqualified total moisture; even if unqualified is determined, it is also difficult for buyer to claim successfully. So the White Paper states that in the future radioactivity, foreignimpurity and eight quality environmental parameters (Sulfur, Ash, Fluorine, Chlorine, Arsenic, Mercury, Phosphorus etc.) shall be focused on monitoring; For other parameters requested in the contract, the consignor and consignee can appoint the third party to test if needed, and the third party will be supervised by inspection and quarantine organization.
