China's Jiangsu province mulls plan to change coke industry: government

BEIJING (Reuters) - China's Jiangsu province will make structural changes to region's sprawling coke industry to help protect the Yangtze River, the Jiangsu Economic and Information Commission told Reuters on Friday. The comment came in a fax response to a Reuters inquiry after Reuters reported that the province is considering shutting small coke plants along the Yangtze River and near Lake Tai. "The province will start doing a thorough research on coke plants and then came up with a plan," the government said, adding that no formal plan has been released yet. Jiangsu province, on the country's east coast, is China's second-largest steel producing region and its output of coke, used to smelt iron ore in blast furnaces, accounts for 5 percent of the country's total on average. (Reporting by Meng Meng, Muyu Xu and Josephine Mason; Editing by Christian Schmollinger)