A UHRP Insights column by Peter Irwin, Associate Director for Research and Advocacy, and Dr. Henryk Szadziewski, Director of Research

November 19, 2025, UHRP

As world leaders gather in Belém this week for COP30, China arrives with familiar rhetoric: a pledge to peak carbon emissions before 2030 and to achieve carbon neutrality before 2060. This includes previous pledges to “strictly control” coal-fired power generation projects and to phase down coal consumption from now until the end of the decade.

But China is also the world’s largest polluter, responsible for nearly one-third of global CO2 emissions, higher than the next four emitters combined. Despite these climate commitments, coal still anchors China’s energy and industrial system. Beijing approved a surge of new coal mines and coal-fired power plants in 2023 and 2024, ostensibly to reinforce energy security and support heavy industries.

In 2024, China continued to lead global coal activity, with the total of new projects, commissions, and ongoing construction surpassing that of all other countries combined.

In addition to the nationwide acceleration of coal projects, Beijing is steering many of its most emissions-intensive industrial growth into the Uyghur Region and Inner Mongolia. Nowhere is this clearer than in the rapid buildout of coal-chemical facilities in the Uyghur Region.

So-called “coal-to-chemical” or “coal gasification” projects convert coal into fuels and industrial chemicals such as synthetic gas, diesel, methanol, and plastics through highly energy-intensive processing. In the Uyghur Region, where many of China’s newest coal-chemical hubs are being built, these projects generate enormous carbon emissions, toxic waste, and heavy water depletion, deepening environmental harm in a region already facing severe ecological stress.

The 2025 Global Coal Exit List (GCEL 2025), published by the German NGO Urgewald in coalition with 50 NGO partners, makes this contradiction unmistakable, revealing that China is now the global epicenter of new coal-to-chemical projects. The new data shows that China is currently developing 21 major coal-chemical projects, many concentrated in the Uyghur Region.

Research shows that coal-based chemical production emits significantly more CO2 than the same process using petrochemicals. According to the Oxford Institute for Energy Studies (OIES), coal-chemical accounted for 5.4% of China’s national emissions in 2020. According to a 2024 analysis by the Helsinki-based Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA), even as China expects to phase down coal within the country’s power sector and some industrial sectors, coal-to-chemical is “likely to be the country’s only major, coal-consuming sector that could still see substantial manufacturing capacity expansion and emissions spikes.”

The OIES paper underscores that water availability remains a major limiting factor for coal-chemical development, and warns that further expansion of China’s already large coal-chemical sector is likely to drive unsustainably high levels of water use.

A 2025 analysis of water scarcity in the Uyghur Region found that its water resources are likely to decline significantly over the next several decades, with rising domestic and industrial withdrawals driving worsening shortages. The findings echo a 2016 analysis by World Resources Institute, which showed that the Uyghur homeland faces “high” to “extremely high” competition for water.

Among the new coal-to-chemical projects identified in Urgewald’s 2025 Global Coal Exit List is one proposed by Tebian Electric Apparatus (TBEA),¹ a Chinese multinational conglomerate specializing in electrical equipment, energy infrastructure, and industrial manufacturing. To fuel the project, the company aims to vastly expand a massive open pit mine in the southeast of the Junggar Basin, which would make it the largest in the world.

Another major coal-chemical project under construction in the Uyghur Region is CHN Energy’s Zhundong coal-to-gas plant, linked to a mining complex planned for significant expansion that could sustain operations for the next 90 years. As noted by Urgewald, synthetic gas from both of these plants will be sent directly to China’s eastern cities “where coal power plants are being replaced with plants fired by gas.”

Expansion of these projects will, in effect, transfer coal pollution from east to west into regions like the Uyghur homeland and Southern Mongolia, which will increasingly absorb environmental burdens to power the rest of the country. Chinese government data cited by CREA has already shown that while eastern China’s overall air quality improved in the first quarter of 2025, the Uyghur Region’s worsened.

Beyond the Uyghur Region, Chinese firms continue to support coal projects overseas despite China’s 2021 pledge to halt the building of new coal power plants abroad, further illustrating the gap between rhetoric and reality. Research from Global Energy Monitor and Climate Rights International has shown that Chinese firms continue financing such projects in Kyrgyzstan, Zambia and Zimbabwe, as well as captive coal plants for industrial operations in Indonesia, including large-scale nickel and aluminum smelters.

Urgewald’s recent research raises further questions about China’s coal-related energy footprint. Their findings highlight unresolved issues around who finances these industrial coal plants, how land is acquired and governed, and the scale of resulting air and water pollution. Together, these gaps underline how Beijing’s “strict control” of coal projects remains partial and uneven.

For Uyghurs, the impacts are immediate. Coal-to-chemical plants and industrial activity pollute air and water, strain scarce water resources, and exacerbate climate change, while industrial agriculture and chemical byproducts further degrade soil and ecosystems. Uyghurs will bear disproportionate environmental harms, echoing patterns seen worldwide where marginalized populations shoulder the costs of resource extraction.

The contradiction is stark. China promises climate action while intensifying industrial activity in a region already at risk of facing an ecological crisis alongside ongoing atrocity crimes. Unless China confronts the structural inequalities embedded in its domestic governance, its climate pledges on the global stage appear symbolic, leaving Uyghurs and other vulnerable communities to shoulder the resulting human and environmental burdens.