India’s Budget allocation for carbon capture, use and storage opens the door to research in atmospheric CO2 removal, reticular chemistry and coal gasification
The Trump administration’s move to scrap the endangerment determination regarding greenhouse gas emissions gives added salience to the Indian Budget’s pathbreaking move to allocate Rs 20,000 crore over the next five years to carbon capture, use and storage (CCUS).
That the Trump administration is hostile to climate action is not news — the US President has taken the US out of the Paris Accord twice (JoeBiden had rejoined the Accord after America’s Trump-led exit in his first term).
But Trump’s latest move is more radical. He is scrapping the Obama-era ‘endangerment finding’, the 2009 official determination that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases (GHGs) harm public health and welfare, which serves as the legal basis for regulating their emissions under the Clean Air Act.
Surging data centres
If the basis of regulation itself is done away with, that would render all climate-related regulation arbitrary, eligible to be struck down. Vehicle emission standards would die, for example. The Trump administration’s Environmental Protection Agency is poised to remove all controls on power plant emissions as well. This matters immensely, in the face of the coming acceleration in energy production to fuel the data centres being built in the US to keep that country the global leader in artificial intelligence.
India needs to focus on gasification of coal as a major priority, to create from domestic sources not just a fuel cleaner than coal, but also power generation capacity
Data centres devour power by the megawatthour (MWh), and data centre capacity is measured in the power required to run them – 1 gigawatt (GW), 1.5 GW, and so on. US tech companies have announced plans to spend $650 billion in the near term to build data centres.
The policy of stripping power generation of any restraint on the release of emissions might warm the cockles of the hearts of oil and gas company CEO, but will fill their lungs with particulate matter smaller than 2.5 micron across.
Also read: Indian-led team develops technique to use discarded face masks for carbon capture
Largescale greenhouse gas emissions in one country do not stay in that country. The warming effect of carbon dioxide, methane, water vapour, nitrous oxide and fellow pollutants is global, not local. Steady global warming feeds extreme weather events across the world, more furious hurricanes and cyclones, longer and more desiccating droughts, more frequent and intense forest fires, landslides, flash floods, and rise in sea levels.
CCUS Budget boost
The AI boom might or might not destroy more jobs than it creates — that remains conjecture as of now. But generation of the power required to develop AI models and run them would definitely harm people, particularly the most vulnerable sections — particularly if all concern about controlling emissions is thrown to the wind as a matter of policy.
This is where the Union Budget’s allocation of Rs 20,000 crore for CCUS comes as a boon. Right now, this five-year allocation is seen as contributing to capturing the CO2 generated in industries such as steel, cement and power, the so-called hard-to-abate sectors.
However, that would be a mistake. The funds must be used to create new technologies and processes to remove carbon dioxide from the air, not just from the chimneys and exhaust pipes of power plants and factories, capture the CO2, and convert it into useful products.
Also read: India slips 13 places to 23rd spot in climate change index, thanks to coal
Every CO2 molecule is potentially the starting block for a vast variety of chains of molecules comprising the entire range of petrochemicals. In theory, it should be possible to build fuels, plastics, and other petrochemicals from atmospheric carbon dioxide rather than from crude oil. The point is to create the processes that would make this possible at costs that are economically viable.
There are several ways to capture and remove CO2 from exhaust emissions and convert the captured CO2 into useful products ranging from graphene to diamonds, both different forms of carbon — allotropes, in the language of chemistry.
Exploring new possibilities
Exciting new possibilities have been thrown up by recent advances in chemistry. The Nobel prize for chemistry in 2025 went to the innovators of reticular chemistry. Reticular simply means net- or mesh-like. Entirely new materials have been created, called Meta-Organic Frameworks (MOFs) and Covalent Organic Frameworks (COFs) that can be engineered to have precision gaps in their crystalline structures to filter out specific molecules from the air.
Let the Budget’s allocation for CCUS be supplemented with venture funds to help startups create the assorted kinds of chemistry needed to make CCUS a vibrant part of the economy.
These can be used to filter moisture from the desert air, to be condensed into a hitherto unimaginable source of water. Instead of desalination plants, which remove salt from seawater, large arrays of MOFs can be deployed to produce water from the air.
Also read: 2025, the year when the weather stopped making sense in India
It can also be used to filter out CO2 molecules. India needs to invest massively in this new branch of chemistry, both as a water-scarce nation and as a future giant in CCUS.
There has to be further research into converting CO2 into other products. India needs to focus on gasification of coal as a major priority, to create from domestic sources not just a fuel cleaner than coal, but also power generation capacity that can be turned off and on at will to accommodate intermittent renewable power at scale.
Time for India to lead
The syngas (synthetic gas) from coal gasification is a mixture of Carbon Monoxide, CO2, Hydrogen, Methane, moisture and some vaporized metallic elements. Syngas can be used to vastly increase the supply of indigenous supplies of gas.
CO2, methane and nitrogen can be made to interact in various different ways, in the presence of different catalysts at different levels of pressure and temperature, to produce all kinds of materials useful to us. India needs to take the lead in this research.
Also read: Metal–organic frameworks: 2025 Nobel chemistry explained
China is the leader in renewable power generation. India should lead in CCUS. Let the Budget’s allocation for CCUS be supplemented with venture funds to help startups create the assorted kinds of chemistry needed to make CCUS a vibrant part of the economy.
The world at large will look up at India, if we do this, just as they look down on the US for its denial of climate change in official policy.
(The Federal seeks to present views and opinions from all sides of the spectrum. The information, ideas or opinions in the article are of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Federal.)
