Full speed ahead for tunnel project
Print Edition
CHINA is to speed up preparation work for what will be the world’s longest underwater tunnel when it is completed in 2026, the State Council said in a recently issued guideline on promoting growth in China’s old industrial base of its northeast regions.
The Bohai Bay project has attracted controversy over its cost — an estimated 220 billion yuan (US$35.8 billion), or double that of the Three Gorges Project.
The 123-kilometer tunnel will have a rail line connecting the port cities of Dalian in Liaoning Province and Yantai in Shandong Province.
Wang Mengshu, a tunnel and railway expert who has worked on the project since 2012, told the China Business Journal: “The Chinese Academy of Engineering will hand in the final report on the tunnel to the State Council for review within three weeks.”
The final report has been worked out after the designers took into consideration ideas from the National Development and Reform Commission.
Construction is expected to begin around 2016, and the tunnel is estimated to cut the time to travel from Dalian to Yantai to just 40 minutes.
At present, it’s a 1,600-kilometer drive, six hours by train or about eight hours by ferry.
Bullet trains will run through the tunnel at 250 kilometers per hour.
Investment on the tunnel may be up to 260 billion yuan but won’t surpass 300 billion, Wang said.
Total investment in the Three Gorges Project was 95 billion yuan, while the Beijing-Shanghai high-speed railway cost 200 billion yuan.
The project was first suggested in 1992 by Liu Xinhua, then deputy head of the office of the Yantai City government, and three colleagues, and both cities have been vocal in their support of such a project.
Plans for a bridge or a bridge-and-tunnel project had been rejected by the State Council.
Dozen of legislators from both provinces have handed in proposals for a tunnel to the National People’s Congress every year since 2009.
“The whole northeast industrial zone and the Shandong Peninsula will be activated by the tunnel,” one of the lawmakers said in his proposal this year.
However, some say the investment is too costly for something that would be used by too few passengers.
Passenger trips between the two sides of the Bohai Bay are projected to reach 300 million by 2020, and 60 to 80 percent of these, or 180 to 240 million, will go via the tunnel, according to the planning team.
However, Zhao Jian, a professor at Beijing Jiaotong University, said the 300 million estimate would be “impossible” to achieve by 2020, as the Beijing-Shanghai high-speed railway took three years to reach 200 million.
About 6.5 million people traveled between the two cities in 2011, Zhao said.
“How can the passenger numbers between Dalian and Yantai surpass that of Shanghai and Beijing?” he told the business journal.
Zhao suggested that the project should be delayed by 20 years until there is sufficient demand.
Some seismologists have also expressed concerns over safety as the tunnel lies within a 2,400-kilometer zone which has a history of major earthquakes.
However, the seismological bureaus in both Dalian and Yantai have said that the planned tunnel will be strong enough to resist earthquakes.
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