‘Energy Transition Without Carbon Capture Is Impossible’

CCUS refers to a range of applications through which planet-warming carbon dioxide (CO2) is captured and used either directly or indirectly into various products, or stored underground.

The US, Germany, Japan and even smaller countries such as the Netherlands and Denmark are developing their CCUS infrastructure. But globally, CCUS captures only around 0.1% of emissions—around 50 million metric tons of CO2.

This is expected to grow as climate scenarios that limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius show CCUS capturing around 1 billion metric tons of CO2 by 2030 and several billions of tons by 2050.

A visual overview of carbon capture and storage methods

Credit: International Energy Agency

By 2070, India will have to capture about 11.4 GtCO2e or carbon dioxide equivalent cumulatively from industrial sectors through CCUS. By the government’s own admission, India can currently mitigate a “negligible amount” of emissions through CCUS because of insufficient maturity of these technologies.

India’s CCUS roadmap published in December 2025 lists the “prohibitive cost of CCUS”, an additional energy penalty for the use of CCUS, the challenges in storing the CO2 underground, and the need for research and development as some of the challenges facing the sector.

Besides, there are concerns about how such projects have so far failed to deliver on technical and economic grounds: plagued by high costs, low capture rates, and stranded asset risks. Despite that, India has placed its first bet on the emerging tech.

On this backdrop, IndiaSpend spoke to Vikram Vishal, convener of the National Centre of Excellence in CCUS at IIT Bombay, one of India’s only two such Centres. A professor at the Department of Earth Sciences, he has researched carbon capture extensively and also worked with the government at various levels on this subject. He has edited a book on geological carbon sequestration and written multiple papers on this subject.

Edited excerpts:

In December 2025, NTPC and IIT Bombay have completed drilling India's first well for testing the viability of geological CO2 storage in sedimentary formations such as coal and sandstone. What is next on that front?

Yes, that's a very important flagship project. To give you the background, NTPC has a CO2 capture plant in Vindhyachal where I was also the project investigator. Based on that engineering design and the complete feasibility study from IIT Bombay, in 2022 they set up the first carbon capture plant for a power plant set up in India.

And when NTPC decided to do CCU, that is converting CO2 into useful chemicals like methanol, they realized that large scale conversion will not happen to abate the scale at which we are capturing, or will capture CO2.

Let's say, we can make some products which will have some demand in the market with 1 million tonne captured CO2. But what do we do if we are capturing 100 million tonnes? Then it becomes inevitable to put the carbon dioxide where it came from, that is, underground.

Geological sequestration is the concept that we wanted to prove and also see the feasibility of the sites. We built two test wells to understand first the stratigraphy, the lithology [both disciplines of studies of rocks], and the geology of the local area.

In the next phase, we want to do a pilot test by injection of carbon dioxide into one of the wells, while the other well will be used for monitoring purposes.

We have worked on a CO2 storage atlas in the methane-rich coal fields and were supported by Coal India Ltd and NTPC Ltd. It is a first order approximation which is roughly 395 to 614 billion tons of CO2 that can be stored in the subsurface.

Speaking of geological sequestration, does it carry a risk of CO2 leakage?

We have to ascertain that there are multiple layers of security where we are building such a facility. There is the cap rock, there is a sealing mechanism, a second layer above it and a regional sealing mechanism which keeps CO2 in place.

Globally, over 500 million tonnes has been geologically stored for enhancement of oil recovery or for pure storage also. There's no evidence of large-scale leakage from any of these facilities because a very detailed assessment is done in the subsurface for that purpose.

We need to proceed step by step because any injected carbon dioxide should never leak to the subsurface. If it does, then the purpose of storage fails.

The government has allocated Rs 20,000 crore to the development of CCUS in India over the next five years. Of the five sectors it is targeting, which sector will be most suitable for CCUS to be scaled immediately?

I think all of these five sectors are very important. Almost one-third of the emissions come from the power sector, so that is definitely an important vertical. In the industrial sector, steel and cement are the ones that emit a lot. And since we export a lot of steel, there's a lot of pressure from the international front also to decarbonise [European Union has imposed a Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism which places a carbon price on certain imports—aluminium, cement, electricity, fertilisers, iron and steel, and hydrogen]. So, all these sectors will have to come forward and demonstrate their efforts in CCUS.

There is an energy penalty to the use of CCUS wherein energy is spent in the process of capturing carbon, utilising or storing it, which reduces plant efficiency and electricity production. How does India plan to combat that?

That is true. You see, energy penalty is always there in such processes and we have to do a life cycle analysis of the process. When we capture carbon dioxide and compress it, there is a very high energy penalty in that. But if you can have processes where you can use the flue gas or the emission gas itself to convert to another product directly without getting pure CO2 out, those kinds of processes should have lower energy penalty.

We have to look at how renewable energy sources can be integrated wherever we are doing such activities of decarbonisation and implementation of CCUS.

Globally, CCUS captures only 0.1% emissions. One criticism is that it is risky, and not proven at scale. What do you feel about that?

I see this as a challenge, definitely. Why people have not done it at scale is also because it was not needed to be done at scale at that point. The world was focused on growth, who burns more fossil fuels… Those were our ambitious targets of growth. There was no mandate to decarbonise as a whole. India did not have a net-zero target until 2021.

Even then, five decades of experience exists in capture of carbon dioxide and the US has been doing sequestration since 1972. Other countries have been doing CO2 capture and storage for gas recovery and for pure sequestration also. It always starts with a small number. If we still don't want to capture carbon dioxide, we have already come close to the 1.5 degree scenario and approaching 2 degrees of global warming.

The fact is that almost 80% of energy still comes from fossil fuels, which means emission of carbon dioxide is inevitable. Besides, in processes such as steel making, cement making or coal-based power, CO2 emission is imminent in the process itself. How does renewable substitute that?

It is a very early stage for the CCUS technology, but it is very well proven for the entire value chain. It is also true that we are emitting 40 billion tons CO2 and we are capturing only 60 million tons. But if there is no mandate, there is no incentive. The budget allocation is a policy signal.

There is an upfront cost of around $1 billion for CCUS projects. Do you see it coming down?

Yes, 100%. For example, direct air capture, when it started as a concept in early 2010s, used to cost above $2,000 per ton. Now there are technologies which cost less than $300 per ton. With accelerated R&D, policy mechanisms, and support from the industries for new technologies, it will definitely reduce the cost significantly for the entire CCUS value chain.

In fact, Urjanovac [a company incubated by the Centre of Excellence] is at the forefront of such unique technology. We are giving a product which generates revenue for the company and there is a return on investment in three to five years for most of the companies that we are working for.

But today's carbon capture systems don't capture 100%, rather only up to 90% of emissions. Could you explain that?

Yes. CO2 capture efficiency of up to 90% is also very good. We'll always have some emissions that become difficult to capture in the process. There are scope one, two, three emissions. How do we account for scope three emissions is also an important question. Net-zero does not mean 100% CO2 to be captured. It's only a small fraction that is inevitable through different processes that we have to capture first.

We also have natural carbon sinks. CO2 removal through engineered pathways is the third part. India is using coal right up to the next few decades. And so, both direct air capture and CCUS will have a bigger role to play. It's non-negotiable for the world to look at CCUS as a pathway to decarbonise.

One criticism is that CCUS will become a reason for countries to continue using fossil fuel.

I don't disagree, but what happens to the entire infrastructure that has been based on fossil fuels. Can we do away with that overnight? It's impossible.

Secondly, there are technologies which will be dependent on fossil fuel, even at a net zero scenario. How do we become net zero then? It has to be with capture of carbon dioxide. Clearly, we don't need to extend the lifespan of a fossil fuel but the transition of energy without CCUS is impossible. The intent should not be to produce more fossil fuel and get more CO2 to be captured. But in the interim, as we go through a transition, this should be our intention.

As someone working on CCUS in India, what are some other challenges you see in the sector?

Retrofitting in the existing industrial infrastructure is going to be a challenge, whether it is power plants or steel plants. We will have to come up with a detailed plan for retrofitting. Besides, in the future, new plants will need to have in-built CCUS infrastructure.

Second, it is an expensive technology, so we need policy and fund support. And fortunately, this signal from the government is acting on both.

If you refer to the Ministry of Steel's decarbonisation roadmap, it turns out that as we go closer to net zero, up to 50% of the carbon removal will happen only through CCUS. In that case, it becomes imperative that the new plants have CCUS infrastructure in them. Industries have to be supported at one point, but also held accountable for emissions.

What is new at the Centre of Excellence?

An innovation of the institute that we patented based on our research is now incubated into this company called UrjanovaC Private Limited. We were the only team in India to have won the X Prize of the Elon Musk Foundation for Urjanovac. We want to scale it and we are aiming to go from say, 8 tons per day to 50 tons per day. We are working with BPCL, SAIL, etc.

[Note: UrjanovaC as a technology can capture CO2 from both industrial flue gas and ambient air in the presence of water, which can be industrial wastewater or even seawater. It creates a sustainable carbon management process implementable for multi-billion-ton CO2 removal.]

This Centre was set up right after India announced its net-zero target for 2070 in November 2021. Being an academic institution, we are into research and development (R&D) as to what are the fundamental gaps or areas of research in carbon capture, in carbon dioxide conversion, and also geological sequestration. Then we have some cross-cutting areas of research such as transportation, life cycle, technology analysis.

We have also been associated with different ministries of the government to write technology-backed policy advocacy briefs, placing where exactly are technical gaps, and in what way the country can proceed in terms of CCUS.

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