At a United Nations climate change conference in Glasgow, Scotland, 4 years ago, Indian prime minister Narendra Modi made an ambitious pledge. In the presence of over 120 other global leaders, he set 2070 as India's target year for net-zero emissions of carbon dioxide and other planet-warming gases.
For India, the world's third-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, meeting that goal will require moving away from coal, the country's primary source of energy, and embracing renewable and other low-carbon resources. Along those lines, the government has made significant strides in building its renewable energy capacity over the past decade. Several ambitious investments in the fields of solar energy and green hydrogen have recently made headlines.
But as the country's energy demand grows, renewable energy adoption hasn't been accompanied by a decrease in reliance on coal, a fossil fuel that generates more CO2 per unit of energy produced than other nonrenewable sources, such as natural gas and oil.
In fact, India's coal use is on the rise and not just for power generation. The government is investing in and incentivizing industrial projects based on coal gasification, in which coal is oxidized in the presence of steam at high temperatures. The process creates synthesis gas, a mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen.
The concoction, also known as syngas, serves as a raw material for basic chemicals such as methanol and ammonia. Syngas can also be used to produce olefins and other petrochemicals, though this approach is practiced mainly in China and South Africa. The Indian government is bullish on syngas technology, and officials have set a goal of gasifying 100 million metric tons (t) of coal, about 10% of the country's annual coal consumption, by 2030.
Gasifying coal to make chemicals is not much better in terms of greenhouse gas emissions than burning coal-and much worse than making those chemicals from oil or natural gas. India relies heavily on oil, natural gas, and methanol imports, which not only are expensive but also contradict Modi's vision of making the country self-sufficient. Although many policy experts defend India's coal consumption as an economic right to utilize a domestic resource, it's clear that the country, at least for now, is not moving in the direction of carbon neutrality.
An appetite for coal
In the world's most populous country, home to nearly 1.4 billion people, coal remains the dominant energy source. It is used mainly in thermal power plants, where it is burned to generate electricity. The generated power is supplied to residences and industrial plants through India's expansive electric grid. About 75% of the country's power comes from coal, according to the nation's coal ministry.
"India doesn't have a lot of oil and gas, but it has plenty of coal. Over the years, the country has developed ways to harness it," says Sandeep Pai, head of research design and strategic engagement at Swaniti Initiative, a think tank that works at the intersection of climate action and economic development.
In 2023, India had an estimated 378 billion t of coal reserves, making it the fifth-largest country in terms of coal deposits. With a rapidly growing economy, India will continue to rely on coal, experts say.
Partha Sarathi Bhattacharyya, the former chairman of Coal India, the world's largest government-owned coal producer, says India's per capita energy consumption is among the lowest in the world, but he expects the number to grow in the years ahead as the country becomes more prosperous. An analysis by World Population Review, a website with a goal of making demographic data more accessible, found that per capita 2023 energy consumption in the US was 277 gigajoules (GJ), compared with 27.3 GJ in India. "A population of 1.4 billion people can aspire [to] quite a lot," Bhattacharyya says.
Nikit Abhyankar, co–faculty director of the India Energy and Climate Center at the Richard and Rhoda Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley, notes that electricity demand in India is growing at an average rate of 7% per year. "In the residential sector, the highest demand comes from air conditioners," he says.
India's renewable energy capacity, which this year is five times more than it was in 2014, accounts for about 46% of the country's overall power-generation capacity, but the reality is that less than 20% of the actual power consumed in India comes from renewables. With energy demand set to grow rapidly in the coming years, Bhattacharyya says, renewable sources will struggle to significantly increase their share of the country's power-consumption requirements.
While India aims to generate 50% of its electricity from nonfossil sources by 2030, it also plans to ramp up coal production by as much as 42% during the same period, according to the Institute for Energy Research, a think tank based in Washington, DC. And one reason for the expected increase in the use of coal is that increasing amounts of it will be converted into syngas.