India’s Future Energy Business Plan — Shop the World for More Coal
BOKARO, India — The men who work at Bokaro Steel City (there are few women) behave as though they are in the Wild West. Some are slick and charming with their words. They stand in air filled with fine coal dust that gets into every crevice of the skin and upper respiratory system, while saying that the dust filters are 99.9 percent efficient.
Others, such as the gun-toting security guards, are silent and watchful. They need to be, in order to cope with the pressures that are unique to Jharkhand, India’s richest coal state. The state is among the most corrupt in the country. It is the richest in mineral wealth, and faces a home-grown communist threat called Naxalism. It has a thriving coal mafia, and millions of dollars get traded between politicians leveraging the future of the residents to gain control over the fuel.
Bokaro is an insignificant player in these politics, for all it does is use the coal to make steel. The steel city rises in majestic order above the chaos of Jharkhand. It is immense, occupying 70 square miles including an airstrip, 186 miles of locomotive tracks and a 320-megawatt coal-burning thermal power plant. All this was built in the 1960s, when India was leaning toward socialism and Jharkhand was still mostly forest. It was India’s first steel plant, built with the help of the Soviets.
“This is where hell can be seen on earth,” said David Mony, general manager of operations for Bokaro, referring to the steel-making process.
Navin Srivastava, one of Mony’s subordinates (or “boys,” as he called them), placed his eye against a tiny peephole that serves as a window into the 2,500-degree-Fahrenheit steel kiln filled with blue-hot gas. Black chunks of hard coke imported from Australia are added from the top. Orange-hot liquid steel accompanied by sparks pours out into molds at the bottom.
The ‘boys’ from ‘hell’ take over the globe’s steel business
Despite significant technological advances since the Iron Age, there are few materials on Earth that can replace coal in the steel-making process. There are two varieties of the fuel: metallurgical or coking coal, used in manufacturing, and thermal or steam coal, used in thermal power plants. India is a major importer of coke, and in recent times, supply shortages of thermal coal have been seen, as well. If the gaps get any larger, experts say India could become the largest importer of coal in the world by 2020.
Together with power generation, manufacturing helps make India the fourth-largest emitter of greenhouse gases. Steel and cement, in turn, are driving the construction of buildings, highways and other new infrastructure in developing nations. Even as steel demand from the West fell with the economic recession, developing countries picked up their own production, according to the World Steel Association.
In India, the metal is linked to development in the energy, transport and housing sectors. State-owned Steel Authority of India Ltd., which runs Bokaro, is planning to double its hot metal production in two years, and more steelmakers are moving to the mineral-rich belt of India that includes coal-rich Jharkhand and Orissa.
India’s only source of coke comes from the fields of Jharia, 30 miles away from Bokaro, but the coal extracted here accounts for only a fraction of the needs of steelmakers. The steel plants have adapted by importing coal. The fuel travels a long distance to make it to this remote corner of India. While state-owned Coal India Ltd. supplies 95 percent of cooler-burning steam coal used to generate electricity in thermal power plants, India is a net importer of coke, according to the company’s chairman, Partha Bhattacharyya.
“We can only meet 25 percent of India’s metallurgical coal needs,” he said.
Bokaro brings in 80 percent of its coke from Australia and New Zealand, explained Mony. For the rest, the operators have shopped the world in recent years, according to the World Steel Association. India imports from South Africa and Indonesia, among others. Indonesia, which is the top exporter, also sells to China, Japan, Korea and Taiwan.
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Injecting Tiny Proteins Into the Hunt for ‘Clean Coal’
As big engineering fixes go, “clean coal” has proved an elusive concept. Carbon capture projects remain experimental, expensive and energy intensive. But working with some of the tiniest things in nature, scientists are engineering proteins found in living things to trap carbon dioxide from coal-fired power plants.
“Biomimetic design” is the idea of using nature as a template to create new technologies. Trees are among nature’s most efficient carbon sequestration systems. They trap carbon dioxide and convert it to glucose, placing it in a form in which it stays stable for geologically significant durations.
But at the biochemical level, they are still too slow, according to Michael Drummond, a scientist at the University of North Texas who is trying to identify new “carbon capture” enzymes.
When plants spend about three and half seconds to convert carbon dioxide to glucose during photosynthesis, they are spending an inordinate amount of time. The problem is that an enzyme called RuBisCO, which catalyzes the process, is highly inefficient.
But the basic idea of using biological molecules to capture atmospheric carbon is sound enough to get grants from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy.
Scientists are studying faster enzymes. One that is getting much new attention is carbonic anhydrase — a protein found in blood, among other places, that captures carbon dioxide exhaled by cells. In one second, the enzyme can change a million molecules of the gas into harmless bicarbonate, according to Jonathan Carley, the vice president of business development at CO2 Solution, a Montreal-based company that is one among the few working on biomimetic design.
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Does the Huge China-Australia Coal Deal Square With the Copenhagen Accord?
Environmental activists are attacking a $60 billion deal that will keep Chinese power stations supplied with Australian coal for at least the next two decades.
Under the agreement announced last week, the Australian coal and iron ore mining company Resourcehouse will build a new mining complex to give China Power International Development 30 million tonnes of coal annually for the next two decades. Resourcehouse Chairman Clive Palmer called it the “biggest-ever export contract” for Australia, which is the world’s leading exporter of coal.
But in supplying China, the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, green groups are accusing Australia of ignoring the role it plays in maintaining dirty energy economies around the world.
“It is hypocritical for Australia to on the one hand blame China for climate change and on the other hand try so hard to sell more coal to China,” said Ailun Yang of Greenpeace China. The deal, she said, “will only lock China further up in its unhealthy dependency on coal.”
Bradley Smith, spokesman for Friends of the Earth in Queensland, Australia, said it “drives another nail into the coffin of climate change. If the project goes ahead, then emissions from the exported coal would equal 20 percent of Australia’s total domestic emissions.”
The tensions come on the heels of last year’s climate change summit in Copenhagen. There, President Obama and the leaders of other industrialized nations like Australia successfully pushed China and other fast-growing developing nations to scale back the growth of carbon emissions. While the pledges are voluntary, U.S. leaders have described them as an important step in persuading all the major economies to take responsibility for their role in causing global warming.
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Academic article: Inhibitors of the enzyme AK
Identification and Biochemical Studies on Novel Non-Nucleoside Inhibitors of the Enzyme Adenosine Kinase
Authored by Jae Park, Gayathri Vaidyanathan, Bhag Singh & Radhey Gupta
Department of Biochemistry & Biomedical Sciences, McMaster University
Adenosine Kinase is an enzyme that adds a phosphate to adenosine.
Adenosine is one of four bases in DNA, and when it has three phosphates attached, becomes the energy currency of the cell, called ATP.
A roaring economy is hitched to a galloping coal addiction
JHARIA, India — Night falls here by 5 p.m. and people stream into the open-air market to catch the latest political news. They have much to discuss, because elections are currently on in the state of Jharkhand, which is famous for three things: corruption, a home-grown terrorism threat called Naxalism, and this area’s economic life, which is marked in every imaginable way by coal.
Coal-fired electricity lights a single incandescent bulb in each shop, and the combined yellow glow gives the market a festive air. Underneath this town, the earth is burning. Suresh Kumar, 50, secretary of a local union, leaves the tea shop where he has his makeshift office and steers his motorbike down a road lined with dark piles of mining debris.
The light from his headlight is blocked by plumes of smelly, sulfurous smoke seeping out of the ground. He stops suddenly, seeing how close he has come to the edge of an open-pit mine. In the far distance, there is an orange glow in the sky. It is a non-natural sunshine reflecting the burning of millions of tons of prime coking coal. The underground fire has burned out of control for nearly a century.
Coal is the bane of Jharkhand, and the reason why Kumar and his fellow residents need to move out of the town. If the government has its way, 17 open-pit mining complexes will be built here. Below the town lie 19 seams of prime coking coal. The government’s goal is to get at the coal before the fire does.
There are many offshoots of this little drama that illustrate the high environmental and public health costs of extracting the biggest natural resource sustaining India’s economic boom.
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Automakers Hit Pay Dirt in Rural India
Rickshaws and bullock carts may be anachronisms elsewhere, but they are the standard means of transportation in rural India. But with government incentives and aggressive salesmanship by manufacturers, cars are making inroads into these untouched markets.
India is currently the 11th-largest passenger car market, and in the next five years it will become the seventh-largest, according to Ernst & Young. By 2030, the nation is expected to be the third-biggest after China and the United States. The country adds 1.5 million cars every year to its roads, and experts say sales could explode, a move that could greatly inflate India’s greenhouse gas emissions.
“India is an underpenetrated market,” said Kapil Arora, a partner in the automotive practice at Ernst & Young. “It has nine cars per 1,000 people. In the United States, there are about 800 cars per 1,000 people.”
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