One reason China is not impressed by breathless headlines in Western media about “losing” its oil supply from Iran, may be that oil imports to China’s economy reached a peak in 2020, according to the statistics firm Kpler, and have slowly declined since then. Use of gasoline has fallen sharply due to half of all vehicles being electric, and oil no longer plays any role in power generation or home heating due to rapid expansion of nuclear, solar, “clean coal” and wind.

Now construction has started on a power plant which burns coal with the cleanest process yet. This Ruitan demonstration plant, which is scheduled to operate on the grid next year, uses molten salt to store energy from the burning coal like a battery when a grid has electricity in surplus, and supercritical carbon dioxide (sCO2) instead of steam to use the heat to drive turbines and produce electricity when it is needed.