BEIJING _ Wu Lebin declares himself to be a champion of green development, and he is in a powerful position to make that happen. He is chairman of a multibillion-dollar holding company spun off from the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
His office wall prominently features a large, framed photograph of his handshake with President Xi Jinping when both visited Seattle in 2015.
Washington state is key to his ambition.
He wants to move China, and the world, toward cleaner-burning fuels. And, at the Columbia River Port of Kalama, he plans to build a $1.8?billion plant that would make methanol from North American natural gas rather than the coal that is the feedstock in his nation. The goal is to create a low-carbon alternative that could help in the global effort to lower greenhouse gas emissions that drive climate change.
The plant, in Cowlitz County, would be built by a joint venture _ NW Innovation Works _ formed by Wu's company, CAS Holdings. Construction could begin as early as next winter for a plant that would export the chemical for use in China's plastics industry.
Wu said he has been encouraged in this undertaking by Xi, and noted he has supporters in Southwest Washington, where the plant would provide nearly 200 family-wage jobs and _ over the years _ tens of millions of dollars in local property taxes. "We need to make Kalama successful. It can be a good model for international collaboration and sustainable development," Wu told The Seattle Times.
Pacific Northwest environmentalists do not share in Wu's vision.
They have been campaigning for years to keep the region from becoming a hub for exporting fossil fuels to Asia. They don't want the region's green development to include using fracked natural gas to produce raw materials for a plastics industry that has left a legacy of pollution on land and sea.
Environmentalists were at the forefront of a buzz saw of opposition to a methanol plant that NW Innovation Works proposed in 2015 for Tacoma. That project was canceled.
Columbia Riverkeeper, the Sierra Club and other groups are focused on the Kalama plant, which generated some 6,000 public comments _ mostly negative _ during a regulatory review. It would result in a 33 percent increase in Washington state's current use of natural gas.
"If they build it, they are going to lock us into this fossil-fuel technology for another 20 or 30 years," said Brett VandenHeuvel, executive director of Columbia Riverkeeper. Columbia Riverkeeper has joined with two other environmental groups to appeal two permits required for the project to move ahead.
