Social worker Manonit Ravi says it has been “living hell” enduring the pollution in his village in India’s Singrauli region, where residents regularly battle the effects of toxic ash from nearby coal-fired power plants. The village of Chilika Daad lies only 4 km from Vindhyachal coal power plant run by National Thermal Power Corporation (NTPC Vindhyachal), one of the world’s top “super-polluted” power plants.
Chilika Daad’s 25,000 people have been displaced twice as India has pushed to mine more coal in recent decades to power its growing economy. Some 900 km southeast of Delhi, the Singrauli region provides up to 15 per cent of India’s power generation, thanks to its abundant coal reserves and water supplies.
“For years we have lived with all kinds of poisons around us,” said Ravi, 34, pointing to a mountain of debris from a nearby coal mine. NTPC Vindhyachal is India’s biggest power plant and has a capacity of 4.76 gigawatts (GW). It released about 25 million tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2022, placing it in the top 10 of global polluters, according to satellite data from Climate Trace, an organisation that uses technology to track greenhouse gas emissions.
Arsenic, mercury, and fluoride poisoning in the Singrauli region are widespread because of the heavy metals released by the coal power production, multiple government, and non-profit investigations have shown over the years. NTPC Vindhyachal has sought to address the concerns by trialling carbon capture and utilisation and storage (CCUS) technology to curb greenhouse gases. But critics say it does not go far enough to curb pollution and the money could be better spent on renewable energy.
A bet on carbon capture
NTPC Vindhyachal began trials of the CCUS technology at one of its 13 coal-burning units in 2022. The plant successfully captured 20 tons of carbon dioxide per day between August 2022 and January 2023, and NTPC said it was now constructing a unit that can use the captured carbon to produce methanol, a cleaner biofuel alternative to gasoline and diesel.
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NTPC said the unit trialling carbon capture was “running successfully” in reply to a request for a comment using India’s Right to Information Act. Given that India has no immediate plans to phase out coal, efforts like NTPC Vindhyachal’s carbon capture trial are better than nothing, said Sandeep Pai, research director at the Swaniti Initiative, a policy think tank.
“Whether India deploys the technology in all its plants or not is a question for the future, but there is no harm in piloting a new technology,” he said. But Mark Jacobson, who has studied the use of carbon capture in the United States, the world’s largest user of the technology, was more downbeat. Given how much energy and materials it uses to function, it can end up increasing CO2 emissions, said Jacobson, a researcher at Stanford University.
When trying to transition to green energy, some analysts also say it would be better to invest in more widely used renewable energy than CCUS, which is more expensive. Renewable energy installations with storage are becoming increasingly cheap, which could end up making CCUS a bad investment over the long-term, said Vibhuti Garg, a director at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, a think tank.
“Developers and investors both are betting their money on cleaner and less riskier renewable energy projects with storage capacity,” she said. Asked to address the criticisms, NTPC Vindhyachal said its CCUS unit was cheaper than those being trialled in other countries and that its decision to carry out the CCUS trial was well-informed and based on a decade of research.
Coal investment
Even though India only gets about 12 per cent of its electricity from solar, wind, and hydro power, it has the capacity to generate more than 40 per cent of its power from renewable energy. The government wants this share to rise to 50 per cent by 2030 to meet its net zero target by 2070.
But the intermittent nature of renewables and high costs of battery storage mean the country is still heavily dependent on caol, with devastating health implications for local populations.
Impact of mining in the Singrauli region
India relies on coal for 70 per cent of its electricity. The government has said it will use coal for power generation until at least 2040, and has not yet given an official timeline for phasing out its use.
According to a flagship climate science report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, global coal use has to fall by 80 per cent from 2010 levels by 2030 to meet the global aim to hold warming to within 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times, set out in the 2015 Paris Agreement.
Sarita Kewat, 40, said her family was feeling the fallout from the coal mining in the region. Her home in Muher village, which has been in the family for three generations, is on land that has been marked for clearance to expand one of the coal mines that feeds NTPC Vindhyachal. When land is marked for coal digging, residents are required by law to vacate the premises and be compensated.
Kewat says her family has been struggling to survive on their land for years because of coal mining. “We were poor when we used to forage forests for livelihoods but life was better,” said Kewat, the walls of her house cracked from coal blasting in adjacent mines. “Nobody listens to our concerns.”
Jagat Narayan Vishwakarma, a local social worker, filed a case in India’s top environmental court, the National Green Tribunal, against local polluting industries and government bodies in the Singrauli region in 2014.
The case led to coal mines and power plants installing anti-pollution measures and NTPC Vindhyachal told Context it was taking steps to make sure ash from the power plants does not contaminate the region’s water supplies. The court also ordered plants and mining companies to provide drinking water to communities.
But Vishwakarma was not fully satisfied with the outcome and filed a new case with a group of activists with the National Green Tribunal in February demanding coal plants compensate local populations for the health burden they cause. “Why should people in Singrauli be expected to live terrible lives filled with pollution to fuel India’s growth?” he asked.
Just energy transition
Despite the lack of green energy plans in Singrauli, current coal mines are expected to exhaust their reserves over the next 15 to 20 years, meaning the local population may soon have to start to transition out of a coal economy anyway, said Pai from the Swaniti Initiative. NTPC Vindhyachal and other coal plants and mines provide hundreds of thousands of jobs in the region so a lot of people would be affected.
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The industry employs people directly, such as coal machine operators and truck drivers, but also helps sustain the regional economy, providing jobs to people in services, such as in restaurants and grocery shops. “It is important to study people’s skills, their aspirations and what new sectors can come in, to provide alternate jobs to people employed by coal,” said Pai, who is researching future employment opportunities in the Singrauli region.
Pai said Singrauli was unlikely to benefit from job opportunities in green energy any time soon. More than 70 per cent of India’s solar capacity, for example, is concentrated in the south and west of the country, far away from coal-bearing areas such as Singrauli, and that is where green energy jobs are typically located, he said.
The uncertainty of future job opportunities is particularly worrying as some in the region are already struggling to make ends meet. Vikas Kumar Tomar, Kewat’s neighbour in Muher village, has been unable to find a job in the local coal economy for the past couple of years. He gave up his house to the coal industry to receive compensation and is now living in a tent. “I don’t know what to do,” said 22-year old Tomar.
This article first appeared on Context, powered by the Thomson Reuters Foundation.