Coal emissions cost India millions in crop damages
For Indian farmland within 62 miles of a coal plant, eliminating coal emissions could add $820 million annually in wheat and rice output
Stanford University
In many parts of India, a single noxious pollutant from coal-fired power stations drags down annual wheat and rice yields by 10% or more, according to a new study by Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability researchers.
The two grains are critical for food security in India, the second most populous country in the world and home to a quarter of all undernourished people globally.
“We wanted to understand the impact of India’s coal electricity emissions on its agriculture because there might be real trade-offs between meeting growing electricity demand with coal generation and maintaining food security,” said Kirat Singh, a PhD student in environment and resources in the Doerr School of Sustainability and lead author of the Feb. 3 study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Clean air and food security
Past studies have sought to quantify overlooked costs of burning coal for electricity by estimating the number of deaths linked to resulting pollution. Government agencies and other organizations use these figures – and estimates of the economic value of statistical life – to understand the costs and benefits of various economic development strategies and environmental regulations.
Until now, however, estimates of crop damages specifically tied to coal-fired power stations – which supply more than 70% of electricity in India – have been lacking despite more than a decade of research showing that air pollutants such as ozone, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen dioxide hurt crop yields.
“Crop productivity is incredibly important to India’s food security and economic prospects,” said senior study author David Lobell, the Benjamin M. Page Professor in the Doerr School of Sustainability’s Earth System Science Department. “We’ve known that improved air quality could help agriculture, but this study is the first to drill down to a specific sector and measure the potential benefits of reducing emissions.”
Crop damage concentrated in key regions and seasons
For the new study, the authors estimated rice and wheat crop losses linked to emissions of nitrogen dioxide, or NO2, from coal power stations. They used a statistical model that combines daily records of wind direction and electricity generation at 144 power stations in India and satellite-measured nitrogen dioxide levels over cropland.
The authors found coal power plants affected NO2 concentrations above cropland up to 100 kilometers, or roughly 62 miles, away. Eliminating coal emissions from all farmland within this range during key growing seasons (January-February and September-October) could boost the value of rice output across India by approximately $420 million per year and of wheat output by $400 million per year, according to the study.
“This study underscores the importance of looking at environmental issues under a systems lens,” said study co-author Inês Azevedo, a professor of energy science and engineering in the Doerr School of Sustainability. “Any policy focused on reducing emissions from coal power plants in India will be ignoring a crucial part of the problem if it does not consider the damages from air pollution to agriculture.”
In some states with high levels of coal-fired electricity generation, such as Chhattisgarh, coal emissions account for as much as 13-19% of the region’s nitrogen dioxide pollution, depending on the season. Elsewhere, like Uttar Pradesh, coal emissions contribute only about 3-5% of NO2 pollution. Other common sources of the gas, which results from burning fossil fuels, include vehicle exhaust and industry.
Broad benefits from emission cuts
The analysis reveals that the value of lost crop output is almost always lower than the mortality damage caused by any given coal power station. But the intensity of crop damage per gigawatt-hour of electricity generated can often be higher. At 58 of the 144 power stations studied, rice damage per gigawatt-hour exceeded mortality damage. Wheat damage per gigawatt-hour exceeded mortality damage at 35 power stations.
“It’s rare to find a single thing – in this case, reducing coal emissions – that would help agriculture so quickly and so much,” said Lobell, who is also the Gloria and Richard Kushel Director of Stanford’s Center on Food Security and the Environment.
The researchers found little overlap among the stations associated with the largest crop losses and those associated with the highest mortality. This means benefits from possible emission reductions in the future could be more significant and widely distributed than previously understood. According to the authors, the results highlight “the importance of considering crop losses alongside health impacts when regulating coal electricity emissions in India.”
“Well-targeted policies to cut emissions could deliver thousands of dollars of increased crop output for each clean gigawatt-hour, in addition to all the climate and human health benefits,” said Singh.
Lobell is also the William Wrigley Senior Fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute (FSI) and at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR).
Azevedo is also a professor (by courtesy) of civil and environmental engineering, a joint department of the Doerr School of Sustainability and Stanford School of Engineering. She is also a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and at the Precourt Institute for Energy.
Journal
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Article Title
Quantifying the impact of air pollution from coal-fired electricity generation on crop productivity in India
Article Publication Date
3-Feb-2025
Burning More Coal at Home Is Worsening
India’s Pollution
India reduced its imports of coal in 2024.
India has been looking to cut its dependence on foreign coal supply to meet its surging power demand.
Considering the fact that India is the second-biggest coal user in the world after China, burning lower-quality coal in India will worsen global emissions.
India reduced its imports of coal in 2024. On the face of it, this would have been wonderful news for power sector emissions in the world’s second-largest coal consumer, if we don’t analyze what’s behind lower coal imports.
India has been looking to cut its dependence on foreign coal supply to meet its surging power demand and has hiked domestic production. While coal is abundant in domestic mines, it is typically of lower quality and contains lower levels of energy when burnt compared to most imports.
Therefore, India needs to burn more domestic coal to compensate for the lower quality. And this drives up emissions from the power sector, Reuters columnist Gavin Maguire argues.
Considering the fact that India is the second-biggest coal user in the world after China, burning lower-quality coal in India will not help a global reduction in power sector emissions, either.
Global coal demand surged to another record high in 2024, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said in December, expecting the world’s coal consumption to level off through 2027.
While coal demand continued to decline in the EU and the U.S. – although at slower paces than in 2023, China and India saw in 2024 another year of record-high coal consumption, the agency said. China was on track for a 1% rise to 4.9 billion tons, and India’s coal demand was poised to increase by more than 5% and hit 1.3 billion tons—a level that only China has reached previously.
In India, coal-fired power generation and emissions jumped to a record in 2024 amid soaring electricity demand and the use of more volumes of coal mined domestically rather than imported from overseas.
At the same time, Indian imports of thermal coal, the type of coal used for power generation, fell by 3% last year from a year earlier, per data compiled by Kpler and reported by Reuters’s Maguire.
Indian coal-fired power plants are running at full capacity at least by the end of this month, per a government mandate. The mandate, which first kicked in in October 2024, was meant to ensure India didn’t fall into an energy crunch amid heatwaves and droughts that slashed hydropower generation.
Last year, India’s annual installations of new coal-fired power capacity hit 4 gigawatts (GW), flat on the five-year high of 2023 and the highest level since 2019. India plans to add as much as 90 GW of coal capacity by 2032 as it looks to meet its surging power demand with reliable baseload electricity.
And as imports are declining, India is burning more of its own lower-quality coal.
Domestic coal production hit a record high level in 2024 as the government seeks to reduce imports.
During the 2023-2024 fiscal year ended March 2024, India’s coal output hit a record high of 997.8 million tons, an increase of 11.7% from the previous fiscal year, the country’s Ministry of Coal said in December.
In the calendar year 2024, up to December 15, 2024, India produced about 988.3 million tons of coal, up by 7.66% compared to 2023.
India’s Ministry of Coal has also taken steps to boost domestic output and reduce imports of coking coal, the one used in heavy industries such as steelmaking.
With industry expected to expand and power demand to soar, India is set to use more of its lower-quality domestic coal to meet its consumption needs. This means no peak power emissions in sight for the world’s second-largest user of coal.
Overall emissions in India are also set to rise if the country does not address coal mine methane emissions, clean energy think tank Ember said last year.
India’s plan to boost coal mining could more than double annual coal mine methane emissions by 2029, compared to 2019, Ember said in a report.
“If unaddressed, this poses a considerable risk for the country’s domestic emissions reduction plans and will have a profound short-term warming impact,” Ember’s analysts note.
By Tsvetana Paraskova for Oilprice.com
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