In her Budget speech on Sunday (February 1), Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman proposed an outlay of Rs 20,000 crore over the subsequent 5 years in Carbon Capture Utilisation and Storage (CCUS) applied sciences.
CCUS is a way of decreasing atmospheric emissions of carbon dioxide — a key driver of worldwide warming and local weather change. In current years, governments and companies throughout the world have proposed it as an answer for industrial emissions, and probably enabling zero emissions in the future.
But the know-how is much from a silver bullet, with a number of criticisms concentrating on the thought itself. Here are three issues to learn about the idea, how the Indian authorities views it, and the debate over it.
1. What are Carbon Capture Utilisation and Storage (CCUS) applied sciences?
As outlined by the Department of Science and Technology, Government of India, “Carbon Capture, Utilization, and Storage programme aims to reduce carbon emission by either storing or reusing it so that captured carbon dioxide does not enter the atmosphere.”
In observe, this may embody strategies corresponding to eradicating the carbon dioxide earlier than burning a fossil gasoline and capturing it, earlier than compressing it right into a liquid state and transporting it to appropriate storage websites. This diagram by the International Energy Agency (IEA) reveals the course of.
How CCUS works. (IEA graphic)
Globally, the know-how has discovered many takers. The European Union issued round $1.5 billion to CCUS initiatives beneath its Innovation Fund spherical, and over $500 million to CO2 transport and storage initiatives beneath its Connecting Europe Facility programme, the IEA has stated. The Netherlands ($7.3 billion) and Denmark ($1.2 billion) have additionally made giant investments.
2. How has India experimented with CCUS?
Since 2018, the Indian authorities has been enterprise joint Research & Development with a number of different international locations to “identify and prioritise breakthrough technologies in the field of CO2 capture, separation, storage and CO2 value addition.”
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A 2022 report from NITI Aayog, the authorities’s assume tank, highlighted the want for its adoption, stating that, “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.”
It stated CCUS has a “critical role to play for India to halve CO2 emissions by 2050 and accomplish net-zero by 2070.” Net zero signifies that the quantity of greenhouse fuel emissions, as an entire, is lowered to such an extent that it might be neutralised by absorption (say in nature or via synthetic removing measures), leading to zero whole emissions.
3. And what’s the case towards CCUS?
The first criticism stems from the price and viability of CCUS initiatives. The NITI Aayog report famous that “Because of the high mobilization and laying expenses, the economics of CCUS cluster projects in the initial years is quite challenging due to lower CO2 volumes and the outsized infrastructure created.”
There are additionally only some operational CCS initiatives globally, despite the fact that the know-how has been pushed for many years. The IEA acknowledged that there have been 40 operational CCS initiatives in 2023, which captured greater than 45 metric tonnes (Mt) of CO2 yearly — China’s annual emissions in 2021 alone stood at 12,466.32 Mt.
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A 2023 report from the London School of Economics (LSE) additionally defined, “The amount of CO2 that needs to be captured through CCUS to deliver large-scale emission reductions is much larger than the current market for CO2 usage.”
Writing in The Conversation, Tianyi Ma, a Distinguished Professor in Chemistry and Renewable Energy, stated that regardless of being “invented by the oil and gas industry,” the know-how has a spot in a complete technique to mitigate local weather change. At the similar time, he acknowledged the argument that “The technology will likely be used to prolong the use of fossil fuels rather than phase them out as quickly as possible. In this view, carbon capture would be used by fossil fuel plant operators and companies as a way to make coal or gas “green”, and delay the full transition.”
He concluded that regardless of the rising investments in inexperienced vitality sources corresponding to photo voltaic and wind, dependence on fossil fuels will stay. Global knowledge additionally present that whereas the world is transitioning to renewable vitality, a lot of that progress has been pushed by mammoth investments from a single nation — China.
He added, “We might not like the idea of carbon capture and storage, but we will need it if we are going to get serious about net zero. At present, there’s nothing else like it for hard-to-abate sectors. What we must avoid is using it to prop up fossil fuels.”
