Dastur Energy is working with international partners and Indian companies to make carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS) commercially attractive and scalable in India.

The company is working on technologies involving capture of carbon dioxide from power plants; converting the carbon dioxide into useful products, such asmethanol, at an industrial scale; utilising the carbon dioxide to generate oil from ageing oilfields and produce aggregates for use as building material or road laying material, among others.   

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Atanu Mukherjee, CEO, Dastur Energy, said that while the government has committed 500 GW of renewable capacity by 2030, this must be complemented with carbon capture technologies, specifically CCUS.

“There is a multi-pronged approach in terms of how you bring carbon capture utilisation and storage technologies into the fold to complement renewables, so that we can address the overall goal of affordable energy and clean energy, which is reliable and available,” Mukherjee told BusinessLine.

According to a government advisory, India is expected to launch its draft CCUS policy framework in about six months, with potential to attract investments of ₹3 lakh crore ($36 billion) to set up 750 million tonnes per year of carbon dioxide capture capacity by 2050.

Scaling up

Dastur Energy has been working with CRI (Carbon Recycling International) to produce green methanol from captured carbon dioxide. The green methanol can be sold at a premium.

“You can sell it in local markets, although that will be a little more expensive currently, given the current scale of technology. But you can certainly sell to export markets in Europe where there is a significant premium for green methanol produced from carbon dioxide, which more than offsets the additional cost you incur for producing it,” he said.

Dastur is bringing in outside technology as well as working on its own innovations to convert carbon dioxide into chemicals such as methanol.

The company is also working with ONGC to utilise the carbon dioxide to generate oil from the ageing oilfields at Gandhar in Gujarat, under the enhanced oil recovery programme. “ONGC is working on, what we call characterisation of the subsurface, which means (finding out) how to inject carbon dioxide in the most effective manner to generate as much oil as possible. Once that is done, and the exact nature of injection sources in the oilfields are determined, we should be able to take this project forward. I would say that it’ll take a few years, but once started it should be at a fairly large scale over time,” he said.

The company is also working on utilising carbon dioxide captured from blast furnaces for conversion into methanol. It is in talks with NTPC on various mechanisms of capture and utilisation of carbon dioxide, as also withcement and steel plants.