The combustion of natural gas/fuel oil and the decomposition of raw materials during the melting lead to the emission of CO2.
Nearly a decade later, China and other governments are driving a massive push for a future of electric cars as they try to shift consumers away from combustion engines.
The internal combustion engine had a good run.
Developing electric cars, the planners thought, would enable China to leapfrog the world's leading manufacturers of combustion engine vehicles, who China otherwise could never hope to challenge.
For example, the combustion engine revolutionised transport.
About one-third of the pollution that clogs the skies in cities such as Beijing and Chongqing comes from internal combustion engines as their citizens turn to driving.
Fine particles are caused by emissions from burning wood and other fuels as well as industrial combustion, and have adverse effects on health, according to the European Environment Agency.
For good reasons of public health, the internal combustion engine has a limited future in the world's biggest cities.
Collaboration between VW and JAC could involve development and manufacturing of fully electric vehicles and hybrid models, where power is provided by a combination of batteries and combustion engines.
The company, the biggest carmaker never to use an internal combustion engine, has achieved a market value of $33bn when producing just 50,000 cars a year — compared with a valuation of $47bn for General Motors, which last year made more than 6m cars.
Alongside improvements in internal combustion engine technology and developments in electric vehicles, one of the main ways is by reducing mass.
Total global car sales in 2015 amounted to 74m — the overwhelming majority using internal combustion engines.
As Robert Gordon of Northwestern University argues, clean water, modern sewage, electricity, the telephone, the radio, the petroleum industry, the internal combustion engine, the motor car and the aeroplane — all innovations of the late 19th and early 20th centuries — were far more transformative than the information technologies of the past 75 years.
While the candle burns, a suction pump pulls in the surrounding air to a simple mechanism that separates the carbon black — a byproduct of combustion — from the rest of the air.
At the company's preshow extravaganza for the media Monday night at a repurposed basketball arena, there was nary a mention of internal combustion.
