From coal to gas for low carbon shift

From coal to gas for low carbon shift

India’s energy security gets a boost, with the Union Cabinet’s nod last week for the coal-gasification urea plant at Talcher, Odisha. It would boost domestic output of plant nutrients and reduce fertiliser imports in the process, by gainfully leveraging our large coal reserves. The project would also be a boost for the Make in India ‘Aatmanirbhar’ initiative.

The lack of gas feedstock has significantly raised urea imports lately in the backdrop of declining domestic production. The Talcher urea plant would induct technology for negligible discharge of SOx, NOx and particulate matter. Successful coal gasification at Talcher would enable technology diffusion elsewhere, such as Korba in neighbouring Chhattisgarh. India is aiming to step up gas usage in its energy mix from a lowly, 6%-odd today, to 15% by 2030. Meanwhile, ONGC and RIL-BP have recently announced plans to raise gas output from the Krishna-Godavari basin by 52% to 122 million standard cubic meters (mmscmd) per day by 2024. Natural gas is the cleanest and most efficient fossil fuel, and we do need to shore up domestic gas output, including by tapping biogas in bio-converters. However, drilling and extraction of natural gas from wells and its transportation in pipelines cause leakage of methane, with far stronger heat-trapping potential than carbon dioxide, in fact, as much as 86 times stronger over a 20-year period. Methane leakage should be curbed.

Use of gas as an intermediate step towards a low-carbon economy also runs the risk of locking into a hydrocarbon for long enough to recoup the investment made. However, gasifying coal is imperative for coal-rich India, to cut down hydrocarbon imports and move towards hydrogen, produced from gas, preferably using clean energy.