China
According to the IEA, China could account for 40% of the world total savings from efficiency gains if it could make its millions of industrial motors meet minimum efficiency performance standards (MEPS). "While China has already adopted MEPS for some motors, their typical operational efficiency is 10-30% below the standard in international best practices," the IEA said.
COST OF UPGRADE
An industry-wide upgrade would have an enormous effect on power consumption, coal burning, emissions and environmental damage. The IEA estimated that China could save the equivalent of 280 million tons of CO2 emissions in 2020, an amount nearly equal to all of its increase last year.
But Philip Andrews-Speed, a China energy expert at the National University of Singapore's Energy Studies Institute, said the recommendation comes with a big "if".
The benefits depend on a series of other measures like appropriate sizing of motors, preventive maintenance and use of variable speed drives. China's factories will need training, support and incentives to undertake such an effort, Andrews-Speed said. Higher electricity rates would be only a first step.
"These initiatives will need to be supported through generous loans from banks," said Andrews-Speed. "Even if appropriate steps are taken, this will prove to be a long-term process, given the sheer number of enterprises using electric motors in China," he said.
While the Chinese regime has shown no substantial interest in building a canal across Thailand's Isthmus of Kra, owing to exorbitant investments against the lack of considerable time saving for shipping, the development of a new corridor circumventing the Suez Canal is being seen in Beijing as a real game-changer in the Euro-Pacific trade dynamics.
In May, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Chinese leadership agreed on speeding up the project for the realization of a railway line connecting Israel's Mediterranean ports of Ashdod and Haifa with Eilat in the Red Sea. The new railroad could transform Israel into a launch pad for Chinese export to Europe, but could be also used by other Asian big exporters such as India, Japan and South Korea.
The $4 billion Haifa-Eilat rail connection is planned to be 180 kilometers long. It should be completed in five years and then extended to the port of Aqaba, in Jordan. According to several observers, it will cut transport time in comparison with the route through the Suez Canal and offer an alternative passage in the event of closure of the Egyptian waterway.
Furthermore, Beijing is focusing on linking Africa's resource-rich inland regions to the Indian Ocean. In May, China Kingho Group confirmed its commitment to investing in coal mining in Mozambique. The Chinese energy company plans to build a second seaport in Beira and a railway connecting the city to the Moatize coal basin, in the country's western province of Tete.
China had already signed in March a deal with Tanzania to finance and build a US$10 billion port in the city of Bagamoyo. The project is expected to be completed by 2017 and will include construction of a railway connecting the facility to the Tanzania-Zambia Railway (TAZARA).
Completion of the Bagamoyo Port "would facilitate China-bound shipments of minerals from Zambia, Zimbabwe and the Democratic Republic of Congo via the Indian Ocean", Tanzania's Ambassador to China Philip Marmo told the Sabahi website on March 27.
China is also assisting Sudan in the reconstruction of its broken railway system. Beijing is the biggest buyer of Sudanese and South Sudanese crude and the major contributor to the development of pipelines and refineries in the region, as well as of Port Sudan in the Red Sea.
When the United States opened the Panama Canal in 1913, it drew a new geography and expedited its global rise. In Washington's footsteps, China seems to be trying to create new political and economic spaces while intruding into the US geostrategic backyard from the West Pacific.
Yet, China's geopolitics involves political costs and not only financial expenses, be they from security concerns in Pakistan, the Middle East, Africa's Great Lakes region and the Horn of Africa, or from environmental protests in Myanmar, Israel and Nicaragua.