Black magic

Smart use of coal can shield India from foreign crises

When Trump’s blockade left Cuba without oil last month, 56-year-old Juan Carlos Pino modified his 1980 Fiat Polski to run on charcoal (bit.ly/41XQzqd).

No, he didn’t strap on asteam engine. Rather, the eighth-pass mechanic added a homemade gasifier – a closed tank for heating charcoal chips, to make combustible gas – at the back.

Now imagine, what an army of PhDs might do with wood chips, or coal. You can look at China, which is sitting pretty amid a global crisis of oil, gas and urea.

Only because it taught itself to make urea, methanol, and basic chemicals like ethylene and propylene – needed to make plastics, textiles, etc – from coal rather than petroleum.

China, like India, has many hundreds of billion tonnes of coal. And it makes 78% of its urea from coal, not gas.

So, this year, its farmers aren’t worried about higher fertiliser prices. They aren’t reducing corn acreage, while US farmers are.

Their chicken feed and ethanol prices won’t rise. Speaking of ethanol, India’s E20 programme will also feel the impact of higher urea prices.

Whereas China, world’s biggest producer of methanol – mostly derived from coal – will have no problem supplying “M15” or even “M85” fuel for cars. It’s even started making massive oil tankers that can run on methanol, instead of oil.

China, however, is not a coal-to-liquid-fuels pioneer. Germany’s 27 coal liquefaction plants made 33mn barrels of gasoline every year, during WW2. S Africa, in the 1980s, made 83.5mn barrels of gasoline a year from coal.

With world’s fourth largest deposits, India should also use its coal smartly. It has an old plan to gasify 100mn tonnes of coal by 2030. It’s also building a 1.2mn tonne-per-annum coal-based urea plant at Talcher, Odisha.

Deadline was 2023, and it would have served us well at this time. But it won’t be ready until Dec 2027. We need better PhDs, of course, but also better project managers.

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