Coal India carbon emissions less than 1pc of India’s in FY20

State-owned Coal India Ltd on Wednesday said that the PSU accounted for only 0.65 per cent of the country’s total carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions of 2,616 million tonnes (MT) during FY2019-20.

Coal India (CIL) said that this is according to the data sourced from Global Carbon Project: Carbon Di-Oxide Information Analysis Centre, of the US. A back-of-the-envelope calculation estimates 30 kg of CO2 emission for every tonne of coal produced. With CIL’s opencast output at 572 MT, during FY20, a little over 17 MT of CO2 equivalent was emitted out of CIL’s coal mining operations, compared to the country’s total of 2,616 MT.

Pollution arising out of coal mining operations is not much compared to burning of the fossil fuel, from where major emissions emanate.

“Mining is a conflict with nature which impacts environment to a certain degree. The effort is to cap it to the minimum. We are committed to fulfilling our part in reduction of GHG emissions in the nationally determined contributions (NDC) submitted to UN. Offsetting the carbon footprint to a bare low is a continuous activity for us,” CIL said.

To balance the CO2 emission, CIL has taken up large scale plantation in its mining areas where the green cover increased to 862 hectares, in FY’21. This is 116 per cent achievement of the targetted 739 hectares and six per cent more compared to 813 hectares of 2019-20.

So far, CIL has created 2.4 hectares of plantation for every one hectare of land used for mining. For the ongoing fiscal, the company is targeting plantation over 1,300 hectares, a jump of more than 50 per cent compared to FY’21.