China's largest coal producer, China Shenhua Group Co. Ltd., will be building in China within the next five years the largest thermal power project in all of Asia.

Located in China's southern Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, the future plant will have eight power generators of one million kilowatts capacity each, the Xinhua News reported.

The regional government of Guangxi said it hopes the project will help improve the region's severe power shortage. Persistent drought in recent years has strained the region's power supply from hydro-power production.

Guangxi lacks coal mines but has deep-water ports being a water resource-rich region. Guangxi will need to build four docks with 100,000 tonnes handling capacity of each to ensure the plant's supply of raw materials. This will also allow Shenhua's cargo ships to unload coal sent from the company's mines in Indonesia and Australia.

The plant will be built in Beihai, a port city in Guangxi. It will construct a coal storage and handling park with a 30 million tonnes annual capacity in Tieshan Port for the thermal power project.

Earlier, an 89.2 billion tonne worth coal reserve has been discovered at Sha'er Lake at China's northwest Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region. Experts said the coal reserve is Asia's largest.

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