Emphasising on climate change readiness, India will set up two centres of excellence in carbon capture and utilisation in Mumbai and Bengaluru to create a roadmap and spearhead innovations in the field. With high emissions of carbon dioxide driving leading to
global warming and climate change, scientists have been working to create processes and technologies that can effectively store and re-utilise the carbon emitted by industries. Although there exist technologies that can capture carbon dioxide released from the industries, they are expensive and economically not viable.
The centre of excellence at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay will focus on innovations and processes, which are industry oriented and increases readiness of carbon capture and utilisation technologies. Not only capturing, the centre will be tasked with working on processes for converting the captured carbon dioxide to chemicals, recovering individual hydrocarbons, compressing and transporting it in order to increase the value of the captured carbon dioxide.
The IIT Bombay centre will develop and demonstrate efficient CO2 capture from representative flue gas from the effluents of power and biogas plants, according to a statement by the ministry. The other centre at Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research in Bengaluru will work on developing materials and processes for carbon capture and tilisation.
The centre will be tasked with developing processes that can be used in pilot mode and scaled up to produce hydrocarbons, olefins and other valueadded chemicals and fuels. It will also work on reaching technology readiness level on par with the commercial requirement at the industry level. The centre will promote the CCU research, provide training and consultancy and translate its research excellence into solutions with global economic and social impact.
