PSUs: Driving India’s quest for carbon neutrality

Public Sector Undertakings (PSUs) in India have been significant stakeholders in the country’s economic development. Due to their presence across some of the key sectors such as oil, gas, energy, metal, minerals, and infrastructure, greenhouse gas (GHG) emission is an area of concern. Thus, their role is crucial in making India carbon neutral.

One component of India’s goal to achieve the targets set by the Paris Climate Accord is to ensure that 40 per cent of our total installed power capacity is sourced from renewable sources by 2030. India’s current energy mix of non-fossil fuel based sources, including large hydropower plants, is already at about 37 per cent.
“Global 250 Greenhouse Gas Emitters” report by Thomson Reuters released in 2017 found three Indian PSUs (Coal India Limited, National Thermal Power Corporation Limited and Oil & Natural Gas Corporation) in the list of 100 companies with most amount of carbon emissions in the world. However, the carbon footprint of these firms is inevitable in a country like India where the economy is still developing.

Success story of CIL

In 2017, CIL (Coal India Limited) accounted for more than 80 per cent of the total carbon emissions in India, which is a shocking number. On the other hand, according to the data sourced from US-based ‘Global Carbon Project: Carbon Di-Oxide Information Analysis Centre’ released in 2020, CIL accounted for just 0.65 per cent of the total carbon emissions in India. The numbers are quite evidently showing the success of the organisation in managing the emissions, which can be credited to various initiatives and steps taken by them.
One of the initiatives taken by CIL in its journey was to retrofit its dumpers, which are heavy vehicles used for transporting coal from mines, with Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) kits. This was done in collaboration with GAIL (Gas Authority of India) Limited and BEML (Bharat Earth Movers Limited), which is also an inspiration for other organisations. In addition to this, the company tweeted last year that CIL has planted more than 99 million trees in an area of 39,842 acres, which has happened through extensive plantation drives by the organisation over several years.
In the beginning of the year, CIL also lined up and approved an investment of `26,550 crore for diversification and mitigating environmental hazards to bring sustainability in its operations. All these efforts have brought great results as far as mitigating carbon footprint goes and has helped the company in becoming an example for other organisations and PSUs.

Current situation

The COVID-19 pandemic played a major role in reducing carbon emissions in and after 2020 in India. India even outpaced the global shrink in carbon emissions during the COVID-19 pandemic with an estimated contraction of 8.2 per cent in the amount of carbon emissions. However, the report highlighted that India was already on the path of reaching negative carbon emissions before the onset of the pandemic. Environmental Policy Statement adopted by various PSUs in the country has also positively added to the mission of achieving carbon neutrality.
In addition to policy formulation, capacity building is also an effective step in order to bring about large scale impact. Standing Conference of Public Enterprises (SCOPE), an apex professional organisation which represents central government PSUs, collaborated with a German development agency named GIZ in September this year in order to sensitise PSUs and train their officials to cut carbon emissions. As PSUs are part of the ‘hard to abate industry’ and have major presence in sectors like coal, gas, and crude oil, the carbon trading initiative unveiled by the Government of Gujarat seems to be effective. Under the programme, the state government put a cap on carbon emissions and allowed the sale and purchase of permits by the companies to remain inside the cap. On these lines, a programme for the whole country will surely help in reducing emissions and air pollution.

Way forward

PSUs are the backbone of India when it comes to power generation and most of these industries are emission extensive due to which the responsibility lies on them to balance production with sustainable alternatives. PSUs under the Ministry of Power have also been given in-principle approval by the Ministry to bid on renewable energy power projects based on their balance sheet strength, according to the Minister of Power.
Raising the concern for minimising carbon emissions of PSUs, New Zealand came up with an initiative on similar lines in order to make its PSUs carbon neutral by 2025 under the Carbon Neutral Government Programme. It is backed by $200 million State Sector Decarbonisation Fund, which will assist in the replacement of coal boilers with sustainable options as well as replacing the government’s petrol car fleet with hybrid or electric vehicles.

Conclusion

The success story of CIL has a lot of learnings and gives hope to the country as well as to the world with regards to achieving the targets of the Paris Climate Accord. Creating and adopting sustainable alternatives should not be delayed further as experts have already predicted that the goal of limiting global warming to under 1.5 degree Celsius is hard to achieve at the current pace. India has gathered good pace and is making efforts to realise the mission on time, with PSUs sitting in the driver’s seat; it is high time other countries try to catch up.