Note:- This example can be used when you write solution to environmental problems.
Unlike many of their fellow engineers though, Aniruddha Sharma and Prateek Bumb have something to show for their many years of toil. The company they founded in 2009, called Carbon Clean Solutions, has created a crucial technology the world needs to reach the low carbon-emissions targets set out in the Paris climate agreement.
The proportion of renewable sources in the world’s energy supply is increasing rapidly, but not fast enough to keep global temperatures from rising 2°C above the pre-industrial average, which is when climate change reaches a critical point of no return. This is why both the United Nations and the International Panel on Climate Change say we need a technology that allows us to keep burning fossil fuels—even as we wean ourselves off them—without releasing all of the carbon dioxide (CO2) produced.
For a long time, such technologies have focused on carbon capture and storage (CCS), where carbon emissions from, say, a coal power plant are collected and injected deep underground at great cost. In recent years, the focus has shifted in part to carbon capture and utilisation (CCU), where the emissions are turned into useful products.
Carbon Clean Solutions built a plant in Tuticorin in southern India that captures carbon dioxide from its coal-fired boiler and converts it into soda ash (a chemical cousin of the baking soda you buy in a grocery store). And, in what Sharma says is a world’s first, the commercial-scale plant set to capture 60,000 tons of CO2 annually does it so cheaply that it did not need any government subsidies.
Building a bridge
That is indeed a remarkable achievement. Though carbon-capture technologies have been around since the 1970s, they have only been used profitably by oil companies to inject carbon dioxide into wells to remove every last drop of oil they can. More recently, companies like Covestro and LanzaTech have been slowly introducing CO2 as a raw material, or “feedstock,” in their commercial production process for polymers and synthetic fuels, respectively, but both have relied on some form of government support.
This is why, though carbon capture is great in theory, it hasn’t gained wide commercial use. There is clearly a cost associated to spewing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and critics have long said that the market doesn’t price the emissions at its real value. Consider, for instance, the European carbon-trading scheme, which was set up to allow companies to trade their savings on carbon emissions with other companies who were spewing more of it than government regulations allowed. It is currently the world’s largest carbon-trading market and it only values emissions at $6 per ton of CO2. On the the other hand, the leading technologies available today are only able to capture CO2 at $60 per ton—a $54 gap, at best.
At the Tuticorin plant: In goes carbon dioxide, out comes soda ash. (Carbon Clean Solutions):-
But there’s hope. At a recent industry conference, Peter Styring of the University of Sheffield told me that the true cost of carbon emissions, measured through environmental degradation and such, is likely close to $30 per ton. And Sharma says the CCU plant, built in partnership with Tuticorin Alkali Chemicals and Fertilisers, captures emissions from coal at a cost of about $30 per ton.
“The next generation of the technology we are working on could cut the price down to $15 per ton,” he says. If the company is able to do that, Carbon Clean Solutions could push carbon-capture technologies into the mainstream.
Before Carbon Clean Solutions came along, the Tuticorin chemicals plant used to buy carbon dioxide to make its soda ash. It also bought coal to fire up its boiler. Now, instead of wasting carbon dioxide that burning coal produced, the plant is capturing it and saving the money on buying any more carbon dioxide. As a plus, the CO2 supply is also more reliable than before.
“I am a businessman,” Ramachandran Gopalan, the managing director of the Tuticorin plant, told the BBC. “I never thought about saving the planet. I needed a reliable stream of CO2, and this was the best way of getting it.”
Chemical magic
So how did Sharma and Bumb do it? The duo launched the company while they were still students at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kharagpur. However, they couldn’t find investors for their company in India. So they turned to the UK government, which was willing to provide grants and special entrepreneur visas.
Since moving to London, the company has filed six patents. Its technology addresses one of the biggest current limitations of the carbon-capture industry: how to purify CO2 out of the many types of gases released from a coal plant.
Typically, this is achieved by first treating the combustion exhaust gases from the coal plant to remove the small amounts of sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides (which can cause undesirable reactions in the next step). Then the remaining mixture, containing mostly nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and water, is passed through a chemical called monoethanolamine (MEA). This chemical reacts selectively with only CO2, and the rest of the gaseous mixture is safely released into the atmosphere. Later, the MEA-CO2 mixture is heated, which releases nearly pure carbon dioxide to be used as a raw material.
The process works and the technology is in action at many plants around the world. But it’s expensive. There’s the material cost: Because MEA is corrosive, the reactor used to handle it has to be built from high-quality steel. Then there’s the energy cost to re-heat and recover the CO2.
“I never thought about saving the planet. I needed a reliable stream of CO2.”Sharma and Bumb’s technology cuts costs at both levels. Carbon Clean Solutions has synthesised a new chemical, called CDR-Max, that does the job better than MEA. Sharma won’t reveal any more details about the company’s main product, but he says that the chemical is less corrosive—and so can work in a cheaper reactor—and requires less energy to release captured CO2.
An independent review by the University of Kentucky, found that CDR-Max captures more than 90% of CO2 from the exhaust of a coal-fired plant. Crucially, it is then able to recover the captured CO2 using only about 30% of energy required by a typical MEA carbon-capture plant.
Scaling up ambitions
Carbon Clean Solutions says it has already sold the technology to a second company building another plant, also in India. Unlike the first small-scale plant which converted CO2 into soda ash, this second one is likely to be using CO2 for manufacturing fertilisers. Sharma is also in talks for a third plant, but won’t reveal details.
The 20-person company has its headquarters in London, but also has employees in India and the US. The last time it raised money was in September 2015 with Eldon Capital Management to the tune of £3.4 million (about Rs 30 crore, or $4.2 million), but Sharma says the company isn’t looking to raise any more because revenue growth has been strong.
“So far the ideas for carbon capture have mostly looked at big projects, and the risk is so high they are very expensive to finance,” Sharma told the Guardian. “We want to set up small-scale plants that de-risk the technology by making it a completely normal commercial option.”
The true test of the new technology would be to capture emissions from a large fossil-fuel power plant. Much like a drug goes from a lab to ever-increasing clinical trials before being sold on the market, a new chemical like the one Carbon Clean Solutions has developed has to go through the same process if it is to be applied at a larger scale. And just like the case of drugs, there’s a high-attrition rate as chemicals scale up from the lab to a big power plant.
Currently, the Boundary Dam project in Saskatchewan, Canada is the only large coal power plant that captures all of its emissions. But there are many others in planning-and-construction phases. If Sharma and Bumb want to make a real dent in reaching low carbon-emissions targets, they’ll have to start thinking big.
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Steve Ovett, the famous British middle-distance athlete, won the 800-metres gold medal at the Moscow Olympics of 1980. Just a few days later, he was about to win a 5,000-metres race at London’s Crystal Palace. Known for his burst of acceleration on the home stretch, he had supreme confidence in his ability to out-sprint rivals. With the final 100 metres remaining,
[wptelegram-join-channel link=”https://t.me/s/upsctree” text=”Join @upsctree on Telegram”]Ovett waved to the crowd and raised a hand in triumph. But he had celebrated a bit too early. At the finishing line, Ireland’s John Treacy edged past Ovett. For those few moments, Ovett had lost his sense of reality and ignored the possibility of a negative event.
This analogy works well for the India story and our policy failures , including during the ongoing covid pandemic. While we have never been as well prepared or had significant successes in terms of growth stability as Ovett did in his illustrious running career, we tend to celebrate too early. Indeed, we have done so many times before.
It is as if we’re convinced that India is destined for greater heights, come what may, and so we never run through the finish line. Do we and our policymakers suffer from a collective optimism bias, which, as the Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman once wrote, “may well be the most significant of the cognitive biases”? The optimism bias arises from mistaken beliefs which form expectations that are better than the reality. It makes us underestimate chances of a negative outcome and ignore warnings repeatedly.
The Indian economy had a dream run for five years from 2003-04 to 2007-08, with an average annual growth rate of around 9%. Many believed that India was on its way to clocking consistent double-digit growth and comparisons with China were rife. It was conveniently overlooked that this output expansion had come mainly came from a few sectors: automobiles, telecom and business services.
Indians were made to believe that we could sprint without high-quality education, healthcare, infrastructure or banking sectors, which form the backbone of any stable economy. The plan was to build them as we went along, but then in the euphoria of short-term success, it got lost.
India’s exports of goods grew from $20 billion in 1990-91 to over $310 billion in 2019-20. Looking at these absolute figures it would seem as if India has arrived on the world stage. However, India’s share of global trade has moved up only marginally. Even now, the country accounts for less than 2% of the world’s goods exports.
More importantly, hidden behind this performance was the role played by one sector that should have never made it to India’s list of exports—refined petroleum. The share of refined petroleum exports in India’s goods exports increased from 1.4% in 1996-97 to over 18% in 2011-12.
An import-intensive sector with low labour intensity, exports of refined petroleum zoomed because of the then policy regime of a retail price ceiling on petroleum products in the domestic market. While we have done well in the export of services, our share is still less than 4% of world exports.
India seemed to emerge from the 2008 global financial crisis relatively unscathed. But, a temporary demand push had played a role in the revival—the incomes of many households, both rural and urban, had shot up. Fiscal stimulus to the rural economy and implementation of the Sixth Pay Commission scales had led to the salaries of around 20% of organized-sector employees jumping up. We celebrated, but once again, neither did we resolve the crisis brewing elsewhere in India’s banking sector, nor did we improve our capacity for healthcare or quality education.
Employment saw little economy-wide growth in our boom years. Manufacturing jobs, if anything, shrank. But we continued to celebrate. Youth flocked to low-productivity service-sector jobs, such as those in hotels and restaurants, security and other services. The dependence on such jobs on one hand and high-skilled services on the other was bound to make Indian society more unequal.
And then, there is agriculture, an elephant in the room. If and when farm-sector reforms get implemented, celebrations would once again be premature. The vast majority of India’s farmers have small plots of land, and though these farms are at least as productive as larger ones, net absolute incomes from small plots can only be meagre.
A further rise in farm productivity and consequent increase in supply, if not matched by a demand rise, especially with access to export markets, would result in downward pressure on market prices for farm produce and a further decline in the net incomes of small farmers.
We should learn from what John Treacy did right. He didn’t give up, and pushed for the finish line like it was his only chance at winning. Treacy had years of long-distance practice. The same goes for our economy. A long grind is required to build up its base before we can win and celebrate. And Ovett did not blame anyone for his loss. We play the blame game. Everyone else, right from China and the US to ‘greedy corporates’, seems to be responsible for our failures.
We have lowered absolute poverty levels and had technology-based successes like Aadhaar and digital access to public services. But there are no short cuts to good quality and adequate healthcare and education services. We must remain optimistic but stay firmly away from the optimism bias.
In the end, it is not about how we start, but how we finish. The disastrous second wave of covid and our inability to manage it is a ghastly reminder of this fact.