India And Climate Change- Productivity Challenge

This is a serious essay. But this passage made me laugh out loud-

Because any imaginable path of development involves making massive amounts of steel, ramping up production at Jharia is a top national priority. Achieving Modi’s billion-ton target, company officials tell me, will require the colliery to increase its output by about 15 percent a year.

The men and women who must accomplish this huge task work in a landscaped headquarters that during my visits is full of people standing around in hallways and lobbies without obvious purpose. One morning I interview an able young engineer. Jammed into the other half of his office are a half dozen older men, one of them his supervisor, drinking tea and telling stories. The interview lasts nearly two hours. During that time the other men do not move. Phones do not ring. Email alerts do not ping. Keyboards lie untouched. The office door opens only to admit flunkies with tea on a tray. Leaving the engineer’s office, I wonder if the activists who protest India’s coal expansion plans would be comforted by this scene. Increasing productivity is going to be no easy task.

Charles Mann writes about the two paths- one solar and the other coal- that India seeks to take to develop and at the same time manage its carbon emissions. The preferred pathway according to Charles Mann's assessment is tilting towards coal.

I  kinda agree. The current government is coming up with innovative ways to speedily access India's coal deposits. One aspect of the damage by the increasing reliance on coal that he did not bring up (besides air pollution) is the destruction of some of India's best forest land in the eastern part of the country. Environmental parameters that are used  to define inviolate forest areas are being  diluted to ease the handover of forest land to mining. That means destroying biodiversity and also means a threat to water security and water quality. Even if the next generation of coal power plants are cleaner, India will pay dearly in environmental costs of lost forest cover and degraded water supply.

I am not  trying  to make light of the challenges that India faces, but with nuclear energy taking a backseat because of large capital costs and a whole different set of environmental fears and no prospect of  a quick ramping up of natural gas from conventional and shale gas reservoirs (reserves may not be enough anyway),  I don't see how reliance on coal can be reduced in the near future.

Health Impact Study Of India Coal Power Plants

Do check out this New York Times interview with Dr. Sarath Guttikunda on the impact of India's coal power plants on health and environment. Dr. Guttikunda founded Urban Emissions, an air pollution research firm based in New Delhi and is also affiliate associate research professor at the Desert Research Institute, the environmental research arm of the Nevada System of Higher Education. He blogs at Urban Emissions.

Why are such studies important?

From the interview:

From epidemiological studies and the recent Global Burden of Disease assessments, it is evident that outdoor air pollution is one of the key sources of disease and death in India.

In order for the public to demand action on controlling the air pollution, we feel that the information is the key element. We need to know the status of air pollution and contributions from various sources like transport, power plants, industries, household fuels, and others.

We feel that this study is important on two fronts. First, it presents data on emissions, concentrations and health impacts of the coal power sector. While this may seem basic, it is unfortunate that this sort of information has not been published previously and we hope that it presents policy makers with evidence as to air pollution and health impacts of the sector. Second, it shows that despite the air pollution it causes, there are minimal regulations in place to address the air pollution impacts.

If the study convinces policy makers of the need to put in place stringent standards and enforce them – then it may be a start to a broader conversation on our energy needs and the environmental and health costs of supplying them.

111 coal plants currently meeting about 60% of our electricity needs, but around 455 new ones planned according to the World Resources Institute.  Dr. Guttikunda says that with so many new plants a mere tightening of emission standards may not be sufficient to negate the health impacts of these plants. An alternate cleaner energy source needs to be available in really large amounts to avoid building so many new coal plants.

Nuclear power.... natural gas... solar... wind..?  There will be no silver bullet solution to India's energy needs.  We'll have to end up using an energy mix. That will include coal for several decades at least.

The Early History Of Coal Mining In India

India's coal reserves come from the Permian-Early Mesozoic continental rift basins situated in eastern India.

Coalgate is making headline news almost every day in India but Vikram Doctor on his blog On My Plate writes about the many shenanigans of early coal mining:

It was an American who first tried to develop systematic coal mining in India. Suetonius Grant Heatly was born in Newport, Rhode Island, but during the American Revolution his family was loyal to the British, and fled to Britain. Heatly joined the East India Company in 1766, possibly because Lord Cornwallis, the Governor-General of India, had earlier headed the losing British forces in America, and was expected to favour the British loyalists of that conflict. Heatly became Collector of Chotanagpur and Palamu (now part of Jharkhand). And it was while travelling here that he noticed local tribal people burning coal fires, Jha notes that the seams are found exposed on the surface in these areas. This was not far from the Damodar river and Grant, along with another East Indian man, John Sumner, realised that coal could be mined and floated down the river to Calcutta.

Grant and Sumner teamed up to get Company permission to mine coal. Yet their first application, in 1770, was rejected. Jha suggests this was because the Company was unsure of its rights of mineral extraction and, in any case, preferred to use its monopoly position to import minerals from Britain and sell them at high prices in India. Also, they were apprehensive about Indians learning how to use these minerals: “They even feared that once the natives acquired the art of smelting metals and the manner of casting them into cannon shot and shells that they would become masters of the latter.”

There were many early attempts in the late 1700's to early 1800's to mine coal but these ventures were never profitable due to hazardous mining conditions, legal disputes over land rights, poor transport and the better quality of imported English coal.  Then later in the 1800's demand reached a point whereby mining Indian coal became economic again. The East India Company backed English entrepreneurs who leased land from local rulers.  There were Indian businessman too. Among them who made a fortune in coal was Dwarkanath Tagore, grandfather of one of the most famous Indian poet writers Rabindranath Tagore. 

Tirthankar Roy in his book The East India Company describes the precarious balance the Company had to maintain between monopoly and allowing its agents and other merchants to conduct private trade in competition with the Company. Vikram Doctor's article brings out this aspect of  Company business life quite well along with the ruthless opportunism of these early coal entrepreneurs.

Read more here.

Indian Public Pick Out Future Energy Winner

One hopes green energy will increasingly contribute to India's energy pie.. but there is no denying which energy source the Indian public and industry place their confidence in..

Coal India IPO oversubscribed 15 times

Carbon sequestration I realize is expensive and not demonstrated on a large scale but maybe we should be giving some space to this technology in our conversations about reducing our carbon footprint.