Cleaning Up Coal - Ravi Deka

It’s ironic how the world’s two most used energy resources are the ones getting the worst rap.
Petroleum is invariably associated with fundamentalist medieval regimes or brutal foreign invasions under the self-righteous guise of ushering democracy. While Coal, which produces 41 % of the world’s and 68% of India’s electricity, is usually thought about only in terms of pollution, mafia, miners dying in explosions and in the recent years; scandals involving corrupt Indian politicians and their Crony-Capitalist friends.

Though boasting India’s first colliery but only having 0.37% of the country’s reserves, in  North Eastern India, it is also infamous  for the so-called Coal Syndicate of Assam and the notorious rat-hole mines of Meghalaya. The precarious conditions and safety records of the latter even made it to the pages of the L.A. Times, leading to the current mining ban imposed by the National Green Tribunal.

It just takes a short 20 minute ride from Assam's capital Guwahati towards Shillong to reach Byrnihat, Meghalaya’s industrial hub. Situated not too close to Guwahati to be a nuisance and far enough from Shillong to be of  concern, the acrid sulfurous air and the grey sky above the town is a testimony of primitive level industrialization gone amok and the corresponding lack of any environmental regulations.

The many Steel Rolling mills there, all use Pulverized Coal Combustion(PCC) in their reheating furnaces whilst Pollution control equipment is either not installed or just never used. Similarly, all of the 40 plus Coal Coking units located in Assam and Meghalaya use the non-recovery type Beehive Ovens, whose design dates back to the early epochs of the industrial revolution and consequently are a source of considerable atmospheric and water pollution. Metallurgical Coke is produced by burning off the volatile components of coal, consequently emitting a host of air pollutants like particulate matters or soot; volatile organic compounds, poly-nuclear aromatic hydrocarbons , methane, carbon monoxide, hydrogen sulfide, ammonia, along with sulfur-nitrogen oxides, directly into the atmosphere. Later the Coke is quenched with water, whereby any remaining volatiles and elements like sulfur and mercury are leached into the ground eventually percolating to a running water body or the ground water table.

The outdated Steam Boilers installed in various factories, especially the Tea gardens are another example of archaic engineering entrenched in the field of coal combustion. Many are relics from another age, while others are age old designs still peddled by Boiler Manufacturers to unsuspecting buyers lokking for a cheap deal. The end result is the same; low efficiency, considerable wastage in unburned coal and high atmospheric pollution.
Preferring to adopt a policy of either total ban such as in Goa, or turning a blind eye as in Chhattisgarh and Odissa, till date none of the State governments in India have been able to constructively address the problem of Coal pollution, while the central government could never formulate a coherent Clean Coal policy. A fact testified by  the Coal and  Natural Gas burning Badarpur Thermal Power Plant in Delhi, which run by the government owned NTPC had been recently declared as the most polluting plant in the country.

So far the only Clean Coal technology that has caught the imagination of the Indian government and private sector, is the controversial and prohibitively expensive Coal to Liquid (CTL) process. Being touted a way to reduce petroleum imports, Oil India first announced a pilot project in 1998 and subsequently in 2006 along with Coal India Ltd., made press releases promising a $2.5 billion CTL plant in Assam. The topic kept surfacing in the news sporadically but with no actual project in sight.

 Tata-Sasol, a collaboration between India’s Tata Group and South African Petrochemical giant Sasol made a few headlines and raked up a few controversies with their plan of building a $10 billion CTL plant in Odissa with a capacity of 80,000 barrels of oil per day. Jindal Steel too has proposed to set up a CTL project next to their DRI plant in Angul district also with a capacity of 80,000 barrels per day of oil products. The two plants, at an estimated cost of Rs 90,000 crore are expected to come up by 2016. Even the “anti-everything” CM of West Bengal, Mamta Banerjee jumped on the CTL bandwagon and applied to the centre for a Rs 10,000-crore coal mining and coal-to-oil project in Bengal.

There is no denying the fact that liquid hydrocarbons can be derived from coal using the Bergius and the Fischer-Tropsch processes and during WWII Nazi Germany was totally dependent on coal based synthetic fuels. In 1944 its annual production exceeded 124,000 barrels per day from 25 plants. From 1955 onwards South Africa’s Sasol had been manufacturing synthetic fuels from coal due to the oil embargo against their Apartheid regime.
A CTL plant has three major divisions comprising of the gasification unit, the liquid conversion catalyst unit and a refinery section, which makes it prohibitively expensive project with a long gestation period. It also requires a lot of land, consumes huge amount of water (upto 15 barrels of water per barrel of fuel produced) and has an appallingly low conversion efficiency of only 42%, meaning more than half the coal’s energy is lost in the process.

With government policies swinging between apathetic and draconian, the private sector’s fixation on touting controversial mega projects for the sole purpose of securing Coal blocks and the undeniable existence of thousands of outdated coal burning industrial units that cannot be scrapped overnight, the eventuality of any realistic implementation of Clean Coal Technologies in India does actually seem very bleak.


Ravi Deka is an energy efficiency consultant and

CEO / Dir. Technology at Creatnet Technology Pvt Ltd.

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