MIT study: Getting the carbon out of India’s heavy industries

To address both climate and air pollution risks and meet its population’s escalating demand for energy, India will need to dramatically decarbonize its energy system in the coming decades. To that end, its initial Paris Agreement climate policy pledge calls for a reduction in carbon dioxide intensity of GDP by 33-35% by 2030 from 2005 levels, and an increase in non-fossil-fuel-based power to about 40% of cumulative installed capacity in 2030. At the COP26 international climate change conference, India announced more aggressive targets, including the goal of achieving net-zero emissions by 2070.

Meeting its climate targets will require emissions reductions in every economic sector, including those where emissions are particularly difficult to abate. In such sectors, which involve energy-intensive industrial processes (production of iron and steel, non-ferrous metals (e.g., copper, aluminum and zinc), cement and chemicals), decarbonization options are limited and more expensive than in other sectors. Whereas replacing coal and natural gas with solar and wind could lower CO2 emissions in electric power generation and transportation, no easy substitutes can be deployed in many heavy industrial processes that release CO2 into the air as a byproduct.

However, other methods could be used to lower the emissions associated with these processes, which draw upon roughly 50% of India’s natural gas, 25% of its coal, and 20% of its oil. Evaluating the potential effectiveness of such methods in the next 30 years, a new study in the journal Energy Economics led by researchers at the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change is the first to explicitly explore emissions-reduction pathways for India’s hard-to-abate sectors.

Using an enhanced version of the MIT Economic Projection and Policy Analysis (EPPA) model, the study assesses existing emissions levels in these sectors and projects how much they can be reduced by 2030 and 2050 under different policy scenarios. Aimed at decarbonizing industrial processes, the scenarios include the use of: subsidies to increase electricity use, incentives to replace coal with natural gas, measures to improve industrial resource efficiency, policies to put a price on carbon, carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology, and hydrogen in steel production.

Read the full post on the MIT portal

Economic analysis of the hard-to-abate sectors in India
by Sergey Paltsev, Angelo Gurgel, Jennifer Morris, Henry Chen, Subhrajit Dey, Sumita Marwah