China has set up a taskforce to draft a law on energy, government sources said Wednesday.

The taskforce, which include officials from 15 government departments or the national legislature, is headed by Ma Kai, minister in charge of the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) and director of the newly-created National Energy Office.

A panel of experts specialized in energy, law, economics and public management are working for the taskforce as advisors, sources with the commission said.

Problems accumulated during the past decades have begun to emerge in the energy sector due to increasing demand for energy to power the country's fast-growing economy, said the sources.

"The complicated and changing international environment poses new challenges to the country's energy and economic security," said the taskforce in a statement.

Coal remains the mainstay of China's energy supply, together with electricity, oil, natural gas and renewable energy resources.

China does not have a basic law on energy that reflects its energy strategy and policy orientation and regulates in general the structure of various energy products and energy-related activities, said the statement.

China is in urgent need of formulating such a basic, comprehensive law on energy to ensure national economic security, energy exploitation and international energy cooperation, and streamline the energy reserve system and emergency response mechanism.

Such a law will help build China into a country that is energy efficient and environmentally friendly through optimizing its energy structure, improving energy efficiency and promoting clean production, and forming an economic growth mode characterized by low input, low energy consumption, low pollution and high efficiency.

The law will also help improve work safety in energy production, said the taskforce.

A series of fatal coal mine accidents were reported in the past year despite government's tough efforts to improve work safety.

Earlier this week, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao outlined a number of measures to improve work safety, including more investment in work safety facilities, in order to curb the rising trend of fatal accidents in coal mining and other sectors.

Addressing a national teleconference on work safety which ended Tuesday, the premier said frequent fatal accidents in the coal mining sector and other industries in recent months have resulted in heavy loss of lives and property, which shows that the work safety situation in China is still grave.

He said the government will adopt economic policies such as compulsory allocation of money for work safety and economic compensation for the families of those who lose their lives or get injured when on duty.

The government will step up the reorganization of the country's coal mining sector, encouraging large coal mining firms to merge with smaller ones as big companies usually pay more attention to work safety.

The government will increase funding for technological upgrading to improve work safety in state-owned coal mines through various channels, he said.

The premier promised the government will try to put work safety facilities into all state-owned coal mines within two years in a bid to cut the incidence of major fatal coal mine gas-related explosions in about two years.

(Xinhua News Agency January 26, 2006)