Under the background of carbon reduction, new challenges faced by coal logistics in Baotou City

Carbon reduction has emerged as a prevailing trend across all industries following China's "dual-carbon" strategic goal. As part of efforts to mitigate the impact of climate change, the coal logistics sector, known for its heavy pollution in Baotou City, is undergoing a comprehensive transformation towards low-carbon practices, environmental sustainability, and digitalization.

Baotou's eight major power plants use more than 60 million tons of coal annually and more than half of the coal is transported by car transportation. In the traditional mode of coal transportation, coal vehicles transport coal directly from coal yards to power plants. However, this approach suffers from a critical flaw—a dearth of effective vehicle scheduling. As a consequence, time is wasted on queuing at both ends of the route, retarding line haul transportation and contributing to traffic congestion as well as excessive engine idling. This not only amplifies the release of greenhouse gases and tailpipe pollutants, but also stirs up the scattered coal and dust particles along the way, perpetuating a vicious cycle of environmental pollution.

Decoupling trunk transport from loading and unloading operations

In the field of coal logistics, which is seriously polluting and carbon emitted, G7 Connect has created an innovative digital container solution for Baotou City. The digital is committed to modernizing the traditional coal transportation ecology with IoT technology. We proposed the idea of combining digital container transfer and digital inland hub, which decouples the loading and unloading process from the traditional line haul transportation. The solution comprises self-developed enclosed coal containers and a series of IoT-powered smart terminals, including GPS devices, axle load sensors, RFID sensors and cameras, which installed for each container, truck, reachstack, bee, and station node. And connect the network freight system with the weighbridge system to improve the digital level of the whole chain of coal logistics and transportation in Baotou City. Through digital upgrades, drivers can self-generate waybills, unload goods, and print weighing bills. The system can realize automatic finding and verification of waybills, automatic start of weighing and automatic settlement, change the problems of long-term queuing, idling and dust in the traditional mode, greatly improve the efficiency of coal transportation, reduce pollution and carbon emissions. In addition, new energy shuttles are introduced to undertake the transportation from the station to the power plant in the "last mile", further reducing carbon emissions during transportation.

Power plants, trade logisticians and governments are benefiting

Digital container greatly reduces the queuing time of transportation vehicles at the power plant end, optimizes the time for drivers to make a round trip from 15 hours to more than 4 hours, and increases the trunk transportation vehicle from less than 1 trip per day to 4-6 trips per day, increasing transportation efficiency by more than 4 times and reducing transportation costs by 10%.

Under the digital container mode, the problems of low trunk line transportation, idle queuing, and in-transit pollution in coal transportation have been effectively solved. At the same time, It also reduced 26,000 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) during transportation by 26,000 tons per year for Huadian Energy Baotou Company (pilot). With the full promotion of the G7 Connect digital container model in Baotou City, it is estimated that Baotou's coal logistics can reduce carbon emissions by as little as 215,500 tons in the initial stage and eventually reduce carbon emissions by 500,000 tons as new energy vehicles gradually replace coal-fired and LNG vehicles. At the same time, from the Ordos coal mine to the Baotou power plant, it can reduce PM10 by about 36,000 tons per year.