Air pollution, especially acid rain, has posed great challenge to the smooth achievement of China's big goal of building a fully well-off society, China's national environmental watchdog Thursday said Thursday at a press conference.

The degree of acid rain contamination had climbed up in 2005 but the area basically remained stable, said the State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA).

A SEPA list finds 357, or 51.3 percent, of all the 696 cities and counties that carry out acid rain monitoring across the country had experienced the rain.

SEPA said at the press conference that China discharged 25.49 million tons of sulfur dioxide in 2005, atop the world's list.

  

The amount is 27 percent over that in 2000, said the SEPA, pinning 21.684 million tons as industrial discharge and 3.89 million as living discharge.

 

Each ton of the discharge may cause 20,000 yuan (about US$2,500) of economic losses, said Li Xinmin, deputy director of SEPA's air pollution department.

 

Calculating on that basis, China may have suffered a total loss of 509.8 billion yuan (US$63.625 billion) the whole year of 2005.

 

Li said China's coal consumption increased more than 800 million tons in the 2001-2005 period, among which 500 million were wolfed by the power industry.

 

"Coal accounts for 70 percent of China's energy consumption. This fact is hard to change in a short term," he said.

 

He explained that 80 percent of the coal is used for direct combustion, and coal-fired power plants have burnt half of the total coal in China, which generates large amounts of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide and soot.

 

The country, with only about 5 million kilowatt capacity of desulfurization facilities put into operation by 2000, has been promoting desulfurization work among all thermal power plants.

 

By the end of 2005, there had been 142 desulfurization projects, either completed or under construction, for major in-service thermal power plants with a total installed capacity of approximately 50 million kilowatts.

(Xinhua News Agency August 3, 2006)