New petcoke Standard released

I have now been able to confirm the source and substance of the rumours doing the rounds at TMS today.

The feature image shows a document that someone gave me tonight. Although it is in Chinese, have a close look at the last line, item 67. The important things on this line that you need to know are that Standard 0527-1992 is being replaced by Standard 0527-2015. The NB denotes that the Standard is an Industry Standard, and the T means it is a Recommended Standard. The Chinese characters in the third column just say that the standard relates to green petcoke. The Standard was approved October 27, and will come into force March 1 2016.

So, a new petcoke standard is coming in a couple of weeks. But it tells us the Standard Number, but it doesn’t tell us what’s in the Standard. Will the limit be 3%?

The person who gave me the copy of this document said that it comes from Customs department. But my Beijing staff checked and could not find anything on the China Customs website, nor on the Standards Department website.

Some people at TMS asked me about the rumour. At that time I had not been able to confirm anything with Beijing. This blog post updates from what we heard here on Sunday. Remember also, we are looking at a document that is a copy of a copy, with no heading or government department name.

We will bring more information as it comes to hand. But right now, we are not a lot clearer on what is likely to happen with petcoke usage inside China.

The document that I was given tonight indicates that a new Industry Standard will come into effect March 1.

Late update: We have now found the source of the document. It was released by the National Energy Administration (NEA).