India is a country under construction. Over 250 million people are estimated to be added to the country’s urban population over the next two decades.
This translates into a massive and sustained demand for building materials such as cement—an industrial sector with high carbon emissions. The Reserve Bank of India (RBI), in a recent report, has advocated for technological intervention to address these carbon emissions from the cement industry which in turn will help achieve India’s net-zero emission targets.
The RBI report noted that India’s cement production is expected to reach 381 million tonnes by 2021-22 while the consumption may likely be around 379 million tonnes. It highlighted that a renewed focus on big infrastructure projects like the National Infrastructure Pipeline, low-cost housing (Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana), and the government’s push for the SMART cities mission is likely to drive demand for the cement in future. “This commitment towards building high-quality infrastructure also poses a risk to India’s commitment to NZE (net-zero emission) norms,” it said.
“There is less decoupling between activity and emissions in the industry sector. Cement production grows by 150% between 2019 and 2040, and emissions rise by 100 per cent,” it noted. Given this future scenario, the RBI has recommended that there is a need to align India’s economic goal with its climate commitments by implementing emerging green tech solutions. It explained that a significant amount of CO2 emissions in cement making result from calcination, while the rest comes from burning coal and other fossil fuels.
“Studies suggest that capturing the CO2 emissions before it enters the atmosphere and storing it away through reverse calcination is the most effective approach to de-carbonise the cement industry…reverse calcination could sequester up to 5% of cement’s emissions at present, which could be extended to 30% with the improvement in technology. This process can be further enhanced by employing green energy instead of fossil fuels to perform the process of calcination,” noted the RBI.
The central bank said that “biomass such as municipal and industrial waste can be used as an alternative to fossil fuels” and “India can also look at fly ash, graphene, natural and synthetic fibres as a substitute for cement.”
According to the RBI, India’s domestic cement industry has made “remarkable progress in reducing CO2 emission levels by about 36 per cent from 1.12t/t to 0.719t/t of cement produced between 1996 and 2017.” To further reduce it by half and “achieve the target of 0.35t CO2/t of cement by 2050, the cement industry requires an investment of $29 billion to $50 billion,” it notes.
The Reserve Bank of India recommended an increase in finance towards green sustainable solutions through subsidised interest loans, proactive engagement with the leading research institutes and countries involved with green tech-related innovation in the cement industry. It also called for incentivising the cement industry to procure stubble from the northern states of Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan as a biomass fuel to execute the process of reverse calcination and pure carbon capture.
