India’s carbon emissions dilemma

India’s carbon dilemma is this: it’s damned if it burns coal, damned if it doesn’t.

If you use coal, climate change will hit you hard. India is among the countries more vulnerable to climate change. Yet, coal is practically the only energy source India has. There is 300 billion tonnes of the stuff under the Indian soil and at the current rate of extraction of half a billion tonnes a year, it could last six centuries.

And we have little else. Wind and solar can’t satisfy the energy needs of the country. In 2014-15, the country consumed 1,110 billion units of electricity, of which just 62 billion came from wind and solar.

There is no way India cannot use coal. However, it cannot ignore the climate impact of using fossil fuels.

The CO2 problem The resolution of this dilemma lies in finding a way of burning coal in such a manner that no carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere. Since it is impossible to avoid generating carbon dioxide if coal is burnt, the only way to tackle the problem is to capture the gas and keep it from harming us.

The answer lies in ‘carbon capture and storage’, or CCS. CCS technologies capture CO2 emissions from power plants and put the gas underground, permanently.

Where to put it may be a problem, but retired gas reservoirs are being thought of as an option. Oil major Shell is planning a CCS project for its gas-fired power station at Peterhead, Scotland.

Shell intends to liquefy CO2 and pump it into the Goldeneye gas reservoir in the North Sea, which ceased production in 2011. Goldeneye can hold 34 million tonnes of CO2, twice as much as the Peterhead power project will produce in its lifetime.

Capturing CO2 and storing it permanently underground is a monstrous undertaking, but there are few alternatives. ‘Clean’ technologies such as ‘integrated gasification combined cycle’ and ‘coal-to-liquid’ can prevent other harmful emissions, such as sulphurous and nitrous oxides, but you can’t avoid CO2 — you burn coal, you get CO2.

Though CCS has been known for long, its use to neutralise CO2 emissions from power plants is very, very new. The first commercial CCS project came up only in October 2014, in Canada (the Boundary Dam project) and there are another 25-odd projects under construction all over the world.

But there will be many more in the near future. A recent report of the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change at the London School of Economics says that 3,000 large-scale CCS plants would be required by 2050 to limit global warming to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrialisation levels.

Serious issue With coal being India’s power mainstay, one would expect the country to take the lead in coal technologies, but there is little evidence that the coal-based power companies have grasped the gravity of the situation.

At NTPC, the country’s largest coal-power producer, CCS is in the laboratories. The company is working on some processes for separation of CO2 and says that any project would be thought of only after seeing the success in R&D.

Tata Power, the country’s largest private power producer, speaks nothing of CCS. It says it does ‘terrestrial sequestration’, which is to grow more trees that can suck up the carbon from the atmosphere. But to grow trees that can neutralise CO2 emissions from thousands of MW of power plants is impractical.

Tata Power says it sets great store by sustainability, but its initiatives, (detailed on its website,) are things like using recycling paper, LED lights and electrical vehicles inside plant premises.

India’s approach to the responsible use of coal has been to look for technologies that yield more energy per tonne of coal, such as the ultra supercriticals and the advanced ultra supercriticals.

However, these are far from commercialisation stage. And even when they come into being, they truly do not help avoid emissions. These technologies only get more energy for the same amount of coal. Emissions per tonne of coal do not come down with these technologies.

For sure, CCS is very expensive. The Boundary Dam project is estimated to have cost a billion dollars. The big question is, how to finance these projects.

The sensible way is to pitch for a slice of global climate funds. The annual climate conferences under the aegis of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change have been talking of mobilising $100 billion a year until 2020.This target is woefully short of the need, and the actual mobilisation is even smaller.

However, it is a fair assumption at this point in time that the urgency of the situation will galvanise the developed countries into contributing meaningfully.

Market revival There is a strong likelihood of revival of the moribund carbon markets. On July 15, the World Bank held a first-of-its kind auction — of rights to sell carbon credits at a guaranteed price.

Bidders who wanted the least guaranteed price got the right, but not the obligation, to sell carbon credits to a World Bank-managed fund. Twelve companies won the ‘put options’.

There will be demand for carbon credits because at the forthcoming Conference of Parties at Paris, countries will commit themselves to voluntary emission reductions (called, INDCs, for intended nationally determined contributions).

Meeting the commitments could spur carbon markets, as countries that cannot effect reductions on their soil can buy the offsets. CCS qualifies for carbon credits. NTPC, for instance, can earn carbon credits for its CCS projects and sell them in the market.

India’s coal strategy, therefore, ought to be to build CCS projects and get them financed by global climate funds. In fact, it is not even strategy — there is truly no other option.

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