Ulaanbaatar Enters Another Heating Season With Its Smog Problem Unresolved

Ulaanbaatar's heating season begins in late October. The city has spent seven years trying to ensure this one is cleaner than the last, with mixed results.

Roughly 60% of the capital's population lives in ger districts — unplanned neighbourhoods without central heating, where the only way to fend off winter cold is burning coal in stoves. Officials attribute more than half the city's air pollution to those districts, where over 700,000 tonnes of coal are burnt annually.

The government banned raw coal for household use in the capital from May 2019, replacing it with semi-coke briquettes that burn roughly twice as long and emit fewer fumes. The first winters under the ban brought noticeably clearer skies.

Then it reversed. The smog came back with a vengeance during the 2024-25 winter, and officials have not agreed on the cause.

The dispute over the briquettes

Some officials have suggested the briquettes themselves may be responsible, and samples were sent for quality testing in laboratories abroad.

The manufacturer disputes it. Tavan Tolgoi Fuel told members of parliament its production process had not changed, according to a readout from the Mongolian Parliament website. The company's chief technologist, D. Ulziibat, attributed the poor air quality instead to increased vehicle use, private companies burning raw coal, and stove quality — saying 60% of stoves in Ulaanbaatar do not meet standards.

That last point echoes what analysts warned when the ban was introduced. Improved fuel alone would have limited benefit if households continued using traditional stoves, meaning clean stoves and boilers had to be part of the solution rather than fuel substitution alone.

There is a notable connection in the corporate name. Tavan Tolgoi is also Mongolia's largest coal mine, the operation underpinning the export revenue on which the national budget depends. The same deposit supplies both the export earnings and the household fuel at the centre of the capital's health crisis.

The scale of the problem

The health cost has been quantified, if not recently. The World Bank estimated that more than 2,400 people died from air pollution in 2013, a loss it valued at 6.9% of GDP. In one ger district during a recent December, pollution exceeded the World Health Organization's safe limit by more than 30 times.

Ulaanbaatar is the world's coldest capital, with winter running from late October to March, and its population has tripled in three decades as rural residents migrate toward jobs and education.

Structural remedies are advancing slowly. Ger districts have fallen from 50.2% to 44% of the city, as apartment construction replaces them. The government's current list of measures includes curbing vehicle use, improving home insulation and expanding natural gas to reduce coal reliance.

What to watch

The first readings of the season, from late October, are the immediate indicator.

The second is the briquette testing. If the laboratory results implicate the fuel, the policy that produced the initial improvement becomes the problem.

The third is stoves. Sixty per cent falling below standard is the gap between a fuel policy and an air quality outcome, and it is the least discussed of the three.