7th EU India Clean Coal Working Group, Brussels, 17-18 June

Posted: 19 June 2013 By: Dr John Topper

I was invited to participate in the 7th EU India Clean Coal Working Group in Brussels on 17-18 June.  About 50 people were present including senior officials from India’s Ministry of Power led by Mr ICP Keshari, Joint Secretary (Thermal) Ministry of Power. Central Electricity Authority, BHEL (a valued IEACCC member), NTPC and Thermax were all represented. A number of old friends to IEACCC were amongst them, particularly Sanjay Sharma from the CEA who hosted a workshop to assist with developing the IEA’s High Efficiency, Low Emissions (HELE) roadmap about 18 months ago; also Mr Jawalhar and Ms Bindu from the Tiruchirappalli Regional Engineering College who we have helped with their EU funded CCS capacity building project.  On the European side there were a number of officials from the Commission with good attendance from European power industries and a few from academe.
Topics covered included advanced coal fired power plant (advanced ultrasupercritical was not on the agenda having been considered at an earlier workshop), CFBC, gasification, upgrading and retrofitting to restore and improve plant performance, coal transport systems with time allocated for discussion about co-operation. CCS did feature but rather weakly compared with the aforementioned topics.
The well-publicised problems in India’s power sector were all touched upon; coal and water supply, obtaining environmental permits, frequent blackouts and so forth. The limitations imposed by the grid system were not on the agenda, nor was technology for limiting SOx, NOx and dust mentioned other than in passing.
My favourite  presentation was given by Fabian Bierewirtz of Alstom on retrofitting plants to reduce water consumption and the integration of solar power with fossil based generation. My own presentation was a review of developments in Circulating Fluidised Bed Combustion based largely on a report by our Dr Qian Zhu which will be published this summer. CFBC has been adopted in India but is lagging behind developments elsewhere in terms of plant size and steam conditions and hence in design efficiency.
All presentations are publicly available with a synopsis prepared by the European Commission (DG Energy) which highlights areas for future co-operation. It is my view that the principal advantage of these meetings is the networking which is necessary to promote the transition to higher efficiencies, better practices (specially related to the environment) and to slowly draw India into more stringent carbon mitigation and abatement policies.
(Link to EC web page to follow)