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Government thrusts on making Indian industries environment friendly

BNE News Desk


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Guwahati: The government is developing a long-term strategy to transform Indian business environmentally friendly. The plans were created with India's aspirational net zero commitments in mind.

The government has been primarily focusing on electrifying mobility through promoting the use of electric cars at a greater rate.

 They are putting new technologies into practise in a variety of ways, such as electrifying gas and fossil fuel-using companies and encouraging others to embrace clean hydrogen, among others.

Many advantages, including decreased maintenance costs, are believed to come from switching industrial operations that use diesel and other fossil fuels to electricity.

With the playbook being developed under the direction of the power ministry, it now intends to switch from the usage of petroleum products to electricity across all sectors.

The goal is to attain net zero carbon emissions by 2070 using green energy. 

According to a McKinsey & Company analysis, the investment cost of the electrical equipment is cheaper in the case of industrial boilers, for example. The industrial site's greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions would be greatly reduced if zero-carbon energy or renewable power were used.

Iron and steel, cement, paper, textile, fertilisers and chemicals, sponge iron, bricks, and a variety of Ministry of Micro Small and Medium Enterprises make up the majority of the energy-intensive industrial sector (MSME).

Among the energy-intensive industries, iron and steel consumes the most power, at 24 percent, followed by chemical and petrochemical (17%), non-metallic minerals (9%), and other industries. This is according to statistics from the Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation (48percent).

However, MSMEs have a high electrification penetration rate. Electricity supplies around 76 percent of MSMEs' energy needs, with coal (11 percent) and oil (11 percent) following (6 percent).

In the last ten years, the industry's power consumption has increased drastically, going from 2, 72,589 Gigawatt hours in 2010–11 to 5, 51,362 Gigawatt hours in 2019–20.

According to data from the International Energy Agency, coal accounted for 29% of India's manufacturing in 2020, with oil coming in at 20%, electricity at 22%, natural gas at 19%, and renewable energy at 6%. (percent).

According to a research by the Bureau of Energy Efficiency (BEE), coal is primarily used to fuel furnaces in the iron and steel, cement, fertilisers, chemicals, and paper industries.

It stated that almost all industries, with the exception of iron and steel, reduced their consumption of coal by 6-23 percent between 2009–10 and 2018–19. This, according to the report, can be attributed to technological advancements, a shift to natural gas and electricity, and government programmes like the Perform, Achieve and Trade (PAT) scheme.

Oil and petroleum products are essential to the chemical, textile, and leather industries, as well as the textile and fertiliser sectors. Most of these sectors saw an increase in oil use of 5% from 2010–11 to 2019–14, with the exception of the fertiliser sector, which switched to natural gas.

BEE has recommended evaluating non-electric and challenging-to-electrify industrial processes in order to move to using green hydrogen. The government is developing a comprehensive green hydrogen mission in response to the release of the green hydrogen policy, which is intended to impose a requirement that fertiliser producers and refineries employ green hydrogen.

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BNE News Desk