In recent days, there has been much discussion about the decision of the ministry of environment and forests to impose go/no-go zones for coal mining to protect forested land from the depredations of mining. While many environmentalists support such a policy, others fear such a constraint on accessing coal will pose hurdles to the growth of the power sector, and concomitantly, industrial development.
The balance and trade-off between environment and development is an important issue that must be debated openly, further both among the polity as well as the public. This topic is sure to gain in importance over time, as will related questions such as displacement of people. Ignoring, downplaying, or steamrollering over them, as we have often done in the past, is not the solution.
To some extent, part of this tension between the need to protect our forests and the need for coal to underpin industrial development can be ameliorated through a continuing and concerted focus on enhancing our coal imports for power generation. While India still has a substantial amount of coal reserves, it also has become apparent in recent years that actual reserves are likely to be smaller than what has been assumed historically within the country and by many international agencies. In fact, a colleague, Ananth Chikkatur, and I have calculated that these reserves may not even be fully sufficient for the lifetime needs of the power plants that exist and those that might be built by 2030 (under the scenarios in the Planning Commission’s Integrated Energy Policy document).
The reality is that imported coal necessarily will be an important (and increasing) part of our energy future. In fact, one can say this is already the case – our coal imports more than doubled in 2003-04 and 2007-08, and exceed 10% of domestic coal production. Historically, our coal imports were driven by industrial needs, although in the past few years, coal has begun to be imported for power generation. Importing coal for power generation - and quickly ramping up these imports – needs to be a key and explicit part our future energy strategy. China has already been doing this very successfully and aggressively.
Besides the obvious and significant advantage of relieving pressure on domestic production, imported coal will also be of higher quality. This will allow us to move more quickly to the higher-efficiency technologies.
Indian coals have high ash content and low calorific value and therefore their utilization for power generation comes with hassles. Coal-power-generation technologies have to be modified for use with Indian coals – in the case of technologies such as Integrated Gassification Combined Cycle, such adaptation presents significant challenges. Moving towards advanced coal-power technologies will also have benefits in terms of reducing local air pollution as well as mitigating greenhouse gas emissions.
In fact, as Ananth and I have suggested, the climate mitigation opportunities that come with high-efficiency coal power should allow us to craft a proposal whereby we make the international community our partner in the move towards cleaner coal power generation (along with coal supply linkages) in return for the climate benefits from such a move. Such a “clean-coal deal” will also allow us to expand our power generation faster, while reducing the technology risk in the implementation of advanced technologies. Not only will it reduce the pressure to extract domestic coal resources but it also enhances energy security by conserving these resources for the future. And the use of advanced coal-power technologies with imported coals will also serve as a stepping stone to adapting them for Indian coals.
Thus the use of imported coal for power generation should be seen as an important complement to domestic coal, giving us more time to appropriately navigate the environment-development tensions in this area while also offering gains for the power sector.
The author is professor of policy studies at IIT-Delhi
