India’s government proposed a 200 billion rupees ($2.2 billion) program to ramp up the deployment of carbon capture utilization and storage technology, to help mitigate the emissions of five heavily polluting sectors.
The plan would target power, steel, cement, refineries and chemical over the next five years, India’s Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said during her annual federal budget speech Sunday.
Carbon capture technology, which stores or recycles an industrial plant’s emissions, is gaining popularity globally as nations are failing to decarbonize their economies at the pace required to curb climate change.
India’s booming steel sector in particular is the world’s most carbon intensive, due in part to the proliferation of smaller mills that rely on coal as feedstock. Carbon capture infrastructure, which is still in a nascent state, is expensive, typically suited to large industrial clusters and heavily dependent on their geographical position.
While the government is offering incentives to steel producers looking to cut their emissions, it has recently announced it will include coking coal in the list of its critical minerals, which should accelerate mining and extraction of the feedstock.
“Cost-competitive steel at scale will require high-carbon blast furnaces. Base load electricity will need coal-based generation,” said Nishant Nishchal, APAC lead for metals and mining at Kearney. Carbon removal technologies are needed for India to pursue its net zero goals, he added.
Photograph: Buildings shrouded in smog in New Delhi, India, on Tuesday, Oct. 29, 2024; photo credit: Anindito Mukherjee/Bloomberg
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