China to run 30,000 "clean" vehicles by 2012

There will be 30,000 clean-energy vehicles in China by 2012, an official with the Ministry of Science and Technology said on Friday.

The ministry was promoting a project to put 5,000 hybrid buses, 20,000 hybrid taxis and 5,000 electric vehicles on the streets in 10 cities by 2012, said Zhan Zhihong, deputy director-general of the ministry's Department of High and New Technology Development and Industrialization.

Zhang said the project would save 780 million liters of gasoline and diesel oil and avoid the generation of 2.3 million tons of carbon dioxide.

He said the ministry had sent officials to Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Chongqing and Anhui Province to choose the cities for the vehicles.

The ministry did not specify what companies would make these vehicles but suggested that they would use domestic technology.

China approved the Kyoto Protocol in 2002, an international treaty produced under the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, intended to reduce global greenhouse gas emission.

China, a major oil-using economy, has conducted many tests of clean-energy vehicles in Shanghai, Chongqing, Shenzhen, Wuhan and Dalian.

During the Beijing Olympics this summer, about 500 hybrid or electric vehicles were used by the organizers for transport service.