First Movers Coalition In-Country Workshop

11th – 13th July, New Delhi

The First Movers Coalition (FMC), housed at the World Economic Forum, hosted an In-Country Workshop in New Delhi, India. The FMC was launched at COP26 in Glasgow to accelerate decarbonisation of hard-to-abate sectors. With heavy industries being on boarded as members, the coalition aims to project the collective demand for clean technologies in the market to enable their availability at large scale. TERI supported FMC in organizing the India workshop.

The in-country workshop at Delhi, aimed to gauge the perspective of the industries across three hard-to-abate sectors: i) steel, ii) cement and concrete, and iii) sustainable aviation fuel.

As part of the workshop, leaders from industries, senior policy officials, and specialists from the financial sector were invited to deliberate upon how clean technologies can be scaled, and made commercially available.

In this context, Dr. Vibha Dhawan, Director General, TERI, in her opening remarks at the session suggested that collaborations and partnerships between various countries play an important role in development of, and large scale availability of clean technologies.

Across the 3 days of the workshop, panel discussions and breakout sessions were held to deliberate on opportunity areas, and challenges in scaling clean technologies across the three sectors. Some of the key takeaways from the sessions are:

Steel

For the steel sector, the deliberations focused on the technology pathways available for the manufacturing of green steel, such as hydrogen and enhanced use of renewable energy. Discussions also touched upon the potential for carbon capture in the steel sector.

Discussions also revolved around the burden of paying, and sharing green premiums. Additionally, financing for improved technologies remain a major concern due to their low technology readiness levels (TRL).

Deliberations also touched upon standardization of the definition of green steel, and provision of subsidies for manufacturing of green steel, similar to industries covered under the PLI Scheme.

Cement and Concrete

Within the cement and concrete sector, discussions focused on looking at specific focus areas of carbon capture, usage and storage (CCUS), availability of alternative fuels, promotion of supplementary cementitious materials (SCM), industrialization within the cement market.

Mr. Girish Sethi, Senior Director – Energy Programme, TERI, presented findings of TERI-GCCA (Global Cement and Concrete Association) Low Carbon Net Zero Roadmap for Cement and Concrete sector in India. Some of the decarbonisation levers include decarbonisation of electricity, efficiency in design and construction and recarbonation.

Other topics of importance within the sector were also discussed such as payment liability of green premiums, awareness creation about availability of green products to end-users, prioritizing accounting of embodied carbon, and implementing guidelines on green public procurement.

Sustainable Aviation Fuel

Discussions on sustainable aviation fuel touched cross cutting issues across the policy, finance and infrastructure domains. From a regulatory and policy perspective, participants discussed the need to incentivize early adopters of cleaner aviation fuels, while simultaneously putting in place mandates to enable large scale adoption of sustainable aviation fuel.

On the production side, sectoral experts suggested the need to balance allocation of biofuels to competing transportation sectors.

To develop, and scale clean technologies across the aviation sector, discussions focused around the need to develop new financing mechanisms which can help access international green capital in to the country.