India has enough coal without Adani mine, yet must keep importing, minister says

India now has “sufficient coal capacity” to power itself without Queensland’s Carmichael mine project, thanks to the increased productivity of domestic mines, cheaper renewables and lower than expected energy demand, the country’s energy minister has said. But Piyush Goyal said India would be forced to keep importing coal, including from the proposed Queensland mine, because too many Indian power plants had been designed to run on foreign coal. Speaking at a press conference in Delhi on Monday, Goyal said India did “not wish to import any coal from anywhere in the world” and had enough domestic reserves to be self-sufficient. But even though the country had reduced its coal imports in the past three years, it was “helpless” to eliminate them completely, he said. Many new power plants in India were built to process more efficient, higher-calorific value coal than what is produced by Indian mines. “Previous governments did not ever imagine that India could be self-sufficient and depend solely on its own coal,” Goyal said. “Because of that, 83,100 megawatts of coal-based thermal power capacity has been set up in this country which is either partially or fully dependent on foreign coal.” Goyal said the “unfortunate reality” was that “despite having so much coal in this country, thanks to the myopic view of previous governments, today the nation has to pay a price [by] continuing to import foreign coal”. Goyal’s attitude towards foreign coal contrasts with that of the Carmichael mine’s Indian owners, the Adani Group, and several Australian government ministers, who have pitched the $16bn project as critical to alleviating energy poverty in India. Adani’s top executive in Australia, Jeyakumar Janakaraj, last week heralded the mine and rail project as a way to “address power poverty for hundreds of millions in India”. “To those activists who sit in creature comfort and criticise us, I ask a simple question – what are you doing for those people?” he said, referring to the 240 million Indians who live without access to regular electricity. Australia’s deputy prime minister and leader of the National party, Barnaby Joyce, has said providing electricity by selling coal to India is a sign of Australians being “citizens of the world”. Goyal told the press conference that India would bring in only as much coal as it needed from Australia, and other overseas mines, to meet the 83,100 megawatt capacity that relies on foreign minerals. India’s total electricity capacity is currently 220 gigawatts. “If any mine in the world supplies [coal] in a cost-efficient manner, which helps me keep my power costs low, I will welcome it,” he said. “It could be [supplied] from anywhere in the world.” He said the foreign coal-run stations would be “obviously powering lots of homes, it could be 100m, it could be more”. India has drastically reduced the amount of coal it forecasts it will need to power its fast-growing economy over the next decade. The country’s December draft national electricity plan predicted that, due to slowing demand, there would be no need to commission any new coal-fired power stations until at least 2027. Last month India cancelled coal projects in the pipeline equal to around 13.7GW of electricity capacity. It is also preparing to close 37 coalmines. Should the cost of renewables such as solar, which fell below the price of coal this year, continue to decline, the Indian economy has the potential to be coal-free by 2050, according to a recent report from the Delhi-based Energy and Resources Institute. Last year, for the first time India had a 69m-tonne coal surplus, an excess supply it is trying to sell to neighbouring Bangladesh. Goyal said he expected India’s installed capacity of renewable energy to overtake that of thermal coal by 2022. The country has set an ambitious target of reaching 175GW of installed renewable capacity by that year. Adani last week “gave the green light” to the Carmichael mine and a related rail project, but the company’s Australian subsidiary still needs to raise $5bn in capital. If the mine opens on schedule, the first coal exports are expected to reach Indian power plants by 2020.