Deep in the thickly forested hills in its east, India last month started production at what it hopes will in five years be Asia’s biggest coal mine.
At the open-cast mine, which involves the clearing of more than 18,000 hectares of land, noisy excavators are busy digging for coal that will feed a huge power plant being built nearby to fuel India’s energy-hungry economy.
India is opening a mine a month as it races to double coal output by 2020, putting the world’s third-largest polluter at the forefront of a pan-Asian dash to burn more of the dirty fossil fuel that environmentalists fear will upend international efforts to contain global warming.
Close to 200 nations are set to meet at a United Nations summit from November 30-December 11 to hammer out a deal to slow man-made climate change by weaning countries off fossil fuels.
Asia keeps digging
China, India and Indonesia now burn 71% of the world’s newly mined coal according to the World Coal Association, with new European and North American consumption negligible as their countries turn to cleaner energy.
Other Asian nations are increasingly looking to coal to power their economies too, with Pakistan, the Philippines and Vietnam opening new plants, pushing the Asia-Pacific region to 80% of new coal plants.
Australia’s exports of thermal coal rose 5% to 205m tonnes in the last financial year and are to increase by a further 1m tonnes this year, driven by increased demand.
The rush to burn more coal comes as the world’s major economies, including leading emitters China and the US, have agreed to start cutting greenhouse gases over the next 15 years ahead of the UN climate change summit in Paris.
India has rejected any absolute cuts, arguing that its per capita emissions are far below the world average and that it needs to emit more as it grows to beat poverty.
Coal will remain the dominant source of its energy for decades, India said, but it pledged to invest in cleaner coal technology, modernise old power stations and plant trees to absorb up to 3bn tonnes of carbon dioxide.
The new China?
Because of its low-quality, twice as much Indian coal is needed to produce the same amount of energy as the best Australian coal.
If India burns as much coal by 2020 as planned, its emissions could as much as double to 5.2bn tonnes per annum - about a sixth of all the carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere last year.
That would see India follow a similar path to China whose emissions, after growing slowly at the turn of the century, jumped when dozens of new coal power plants came on line.
