A Study On Trunk Coastal Routes Of Coal Transpotation In China

With the development in our country, the energy plays a more and more important role in the national economy. As a kind of important energy, the coal composes 2/3 of all production and consumption of primary energy in our country.The coal resource in our country is very rich, but the distribution is unbalance. It is mainly mined in the Midwest of China. However, the consumption is mainly in those more developed eastern coastal regions.The unbalance of the production and consumption in our country determines we have to transport the coal from the north to the south, from the west to the east. And we must transport it by both trains and ships. This paper introduces the coal transportation channels (the land and the waterway), and points out the important status of coastal coal transportation in the coal transport system of China. Then the paper outlines the situations of the major coal launch ports in the north and the major coal loading ports in the south China.In addition, to resolve the problem that the sea-route depth and the number of coal berths in southern major coal loading ports do not match the northern major coal launch ports in trunk coastal routes of coal transportation in our country, this paper presents a suggestion of constructing coal transfer bases in Zhoushan Port in the Yangtze River delta and Guangzhou Nansha port in the Pearl River Delta, and makes initial demonstration of their feasibility separately.Finally, this paper does some research on volume forecast, ship selection and simple fleet planning for two classic trunk coastal routes of coal transportation in our country, Qinhuangdao Port - Zhoushan Port and Qinhuangdao Port - Guangzhou Port.