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Sep 05, 2023

This Mile

A Chinese foreign worker stands on the floor of an open pit mine as excavators and dumper trucks used to transport excavated silica sand operate in the background at Sindh Engro Coal Mining Co.'s site

A Chinese foreign worker stands on the floor of an open pit mine as excavators and dumper trucks used to transport excavated silica sand operate in the background at Sindh Engro Coal Mining Co.'s site in the Thar desert, Pakistan, on Wednesday, March 8, 2017.

In the dusty scrub of the Thar desert, Pakistan has begun to dig up one of the world’s largest deposits of low-grade, brown, dirty coal to fuel new power stations that could revolutionize the country’s economy.

The project is one of the most expensive among an array of ambitious energy developments that China is helping the country to build as part of a $55 billion economic partnership. A $3.5 billion joint venture between the neighbors will extract coal to generate 1.3 gigawatts of electricity that will be sent across the country on a new $3 billion transmission network.