By David Fickling
You know an electricity policy is bankrupt when its advocates start touting the virtues of carbon capture and storage.
Decades of promoting the technology, also known as CCS — which aims to filter the carbon dioxide from smokestacks and inject the pollution deep underground — have failed to produce more than a handful of operating plants. So plans by India’s government think tank Niti Aayog to capture as much of 70 per cent of the country’s power-sector emissions should be treated as wishful thinking at best, and dangerous shortsightedness at worst. “We have abundant coal and we want to use it, in a sustainable way,” the body’s energy adviser Rajnath Ram told Bloomberg News.
If CCS is to work anywhere, two challenging conditions need to be met. First, there must be ample underground reservoirs to store the waste gas that’s produced. Secondly, the cost of fossil power plus that of CCS itself must be lower than any alternative technology. India fails on both counts.
Take the reservoirs first. More than 80 per cent of the carbon dioxide being pumped underground at a commercial scale globally is being used in oilfields. Forcing gas into petroleum deposits is a long-established technology to draw extra crude to the surface, which produces a revenue stream to help pay the substantial expense of capture and storage (as well as causing an extra bump of emissions).
That brings us back to the second challenging condition for CCS: cost. The most viable slice of that 359 billion-tonne capacity comes from injecting carbon into briny water deposits deep underground. That technology only works in the presence of a credible and rigorously enforced carbon price. There’s no suggestion that India is promising anything of the sort.
Hydroelectricity is another under-exploited resource. India, like China, benefits from its proximity to the fast-flowing waters of the Himalayas, the richest resource of river power on the planet. While China has been so busy developing this resource that dam-building is now approaching its geological limits, India has neglected the sector. More than 17 gigawatts of projects have been abandoned due to bureaucratic tangles and local opposition. The country is at only about 29 per cent of its capacity for hydropower, with a further 10 per cent under construction. Lifting that ratio would provide terawatt-hours of electricity to India’s cities as well as controlling the floodwaters that periodically devastate rural areas.
The problem Niti Aayog is trying to solve is genuine. India’s energy consumption is climbing at an astonishing pace, with peak levels rising from 130 gigawatts in 2014 (roughly the level of Spain’s generation capacity) to 230 GW last year and as much as 400 GW in 2030 — equivalent to running all the power plants in Japan and Taiwan combined.
Under its latest 10-year plan released last month, the National Electricity Authority expects annual fossil-fired generation over the coming decade to grow by about 162 terawatt-hours, roughly the same increase as has been seen over the past two years alone. That would put power sector emissions well within reach of the peak and subsequent decline the planet, and India’s sweltering population, desperately needs.
First Published: Feb 08 2024 | 6:55 AM IST