I highly appreciate that the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas under the Government of India has initiated efforts to provide opportunities for collaboration and knowledge sharing to the industry and to prepare a unified and practical strategy for development and implementation of Carbon Capture, Utilization and Storage (CCUS)/ Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) techniques in the oil and gas sector in India. A task force titled ‘Upstream for CCS/CCUS’ (UFCC) to this effect is working to prepare the ‘2030 Roadmap for CCUS’ that shall provide necessary direction and guidelines for all oil and gas companies to develop and scale up CCS/CCUS techniques.
Last year itself, in a white paper, Niti Aayog focused on the urgent need of developing Carbon Capture Utilization and Storage (CCUS). It has an important and critical role to play in decarbonizing the industrial sector, which is hard to electrify and hard to abate, due to the use of fossil fuels not only as a source of energy but within the process itself. CCUS also has an important role to play in decarbonizing the power sector, given India’s present reliance on coal for meeting over 70% of its electricity needs. Even if India is able to substantially green the grid and meet the target of 500 GW installed capacity of renewables by 2030, there would still be a need to meet the baseload power demand from fossil fuels (most likely coal) or other dispatchable sources, given the intermittency and non-dispatchable nature of solar and wind power.
Globally, power and industry account for about 50% of all GreenHouse Gas (GHG) emissions. Carbon Capture, Utilization, and Storage programmes aim to reduce carbon emission by either storing or reusing it so that captured carbon dioxide does not enter the atmosphere.
India’s objective and scope of carbon capture innovation challenge is to enable near-zero CO2 emissions from power plants and carbon-intensive industries. CCUS are expected to achieve significant CO2 reductions from power plants (fuelled by coal, natural gas, and biomass) and industrial applications. Obviously, successful implementation of the CCUS will bring in a big change.
Pravita Iyer
Publisher & Director
