The Mark 2010

India's economic rise shows no sign of slowing. Now it needs power, and a business deal with an energy broker. The ideal candidate? Alberta.

Within India’s ascendant economy, newly loosened from previous restrictions by Prime Minister Singh, a pro-active approach to climate change has formed: one that amounts to an open invitation to the Canadian province of Alberta to collaborate on green technology. It foresees a “collaborative R&D effort among developed and major developing countries” in the creation of cost-effective carbon-reduction technologies. With its recognized prominence as an energy producer and close ties to Indian leaders already established, Alberta is the perfect candidate for this project. Clean coal developments forged in the province and the safe, secure, and seemingly infinite Alberta oil sands further mark the province as an ideal partner.

Alberta should begin with advancing clean-coal technology, given its applications to both steel production (India is the world’s third largest steelmaker, and Indian firms own two of the largest steel manufacturers outside of India) and power generation. India intends to add 12,000 to 15,000 megawatts of generating capacity every year for the foreseeable future. (To put this into perspective, Alberta’s entire installed generating capacity is 12,555 megawatts.) To achieve this, the country will turn increasingly to nuclear power, but nuclear capacity will take years to build; in the meantime, its power generation will come from coal.

This is where Alberta comes in. Sherritt, an Alberta company, has significant expertise in manufacturing gas from coal. If clean coal technology can be applied to India’s coal-fired power generation, the planet will benefit significantly. India, at present, produces only 4 per cent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. (Canada produces 2 per cent, but India is 40 times more populous.) As India’s energy production increases to meet both its economic potential and its citizens’ demands, the opportunity is there to “get it right” by increasing electricity generation, while restraining carbon emissions.

Edmonton’s public sector energy company, EPCOR, is building a near-zero-emission power plant using the latest in clean-coal technology. The EPCOR process, which turns coal into a synthesis gas engineered to be burnt in an oxygen-rich chamber, produces carbon emissions concentrated enough to be captured in a closed system. Hydrogen, a by-product of this process, leaves near-zero smokestack emissions, and enables the captured carbon to be stored underground or used in enhanced oil recovery. The captured carbon can be digested by microbes to produce methane, or digested by algae that can be harvested to produce bio-fuels.

India’s coal deposits are notable for quantity rather than quality: you need to burn a lot to generate heat. Right now, India imports higher-quality coal from Australia, Indonesia, and elsewhere to blend with its own, to fuel both steel-making and power generation. With the gasification technology described above, the coal in question doesn’t matter – even the lowest grades of solid fossil fuels can be rendered into synthesis gas.

An Oil Sands Partnership

Alberta’s oil sands resource and India’s quest for energy security open up another area of opportunity. The sands offer the twin virtues of long-term supply and political stability, within a development framework of environmental sustainability. The Alberta government, however, could take a more active role in pushing the issue. Now that the province has decided to take raw bitumen – the heavy form of crude that comprises its deposits and cannot be refined by the same, relatively simple process as other crude oils – as in-kind royalties from the producer, it needs the capacity to actually process that bitumen and upgrade it to synthetic crude oil. Given the imagination and talent in both India and Alberta, it should be possible to develop a business case whereby India and Alberta might jointly produce and process bitumen, with India buying the oil. Whether this is done as a public-public partnership or a public-private partnership is an area to discuss.

Moreover, India has the expertise in building, upgrading, and refining capacity to the highest global standards at the least cost. In only three years, India’s Reliance Group built and commissioned the world’s largest refinery and petrochemical products complex in the western state of Gujarat, producing 1.2 million barrels a day of petroleum and a range of final products from petrochemicals. Reliance’s Jamnagar complex is engineered to take virtually all grades of oil beyond raw bitumen, from heavy oil (12 API, in the viscosity scale of the American Petroleum Institute), to sour crude, to the lightest of light sweet crude (50 API – for comparison purposes, Alberta’s synthetic crude is about 29 API). The Reliance refinery can handle the world’s largest tankers, ultimately opening the possibility of processing the Alberta synthetic crude delivered to Canada’s west coast – either by conventional pipelines or by the Canadian National Railway’s innovative pipeline on rails.

Managing Water

Almost as a bonus, Alberta's oil sands industry can offer significant expertise in managing water and wastewater. India’s main rivers are clogged with industrial effluent and human waste; made-in-Alberta technology can be used to improve the quality of water now being discharged directly into rivers and streams. In using water from deep saline aquifers for oil sands processing and upgrading, Alberta firms have a strong knowledge of cleaning and field creation techniques for large volumes of water. This process of wastewater management and environmental mitigation may represent another decades-long opportunity for collaboration between India and Alberta, one that can be pursued once Alberta and India establish a primary collaboration on clean-coal technology, oil sands, and heavy oil development.