New Delhi hosts Indo-Canadian meet on clean-coal technologies

KOLKATA: Clean coal technologists from Canada and India met in New Delhi on Monday to discuss strategies for reducing carbon emissions during power generation. Kicking off the conference here, Mr B Prasada Rao, chairman and managing director of BHEL called for rapidly accelerating the pace of moving newer clean coal technologies from labs to the implementation stage.

This first-of-its kind initiative was organized by the Academy of Engineering from both Canada and India. The day-long conference hosted by Indian National Academy of Engineering (INAE) and Canadian Academy of Engineering (CAE), as part of the Indian National Academy of Engineering's silver jubilee celebrations.

Mr Rao said that the government has identified supercritical coal combustion technology for coal based power plants of over 660 MW capacity. BHEL is partnering other power producers to establish thermal power plants employing this technology by 2017. The supercritical coal combustion technology allows power production efficiency to move up from 39% to 46% in an environment friendly manner.

Mr Rao said that they are committed to creating clean coal solutions by investing as much as 2.5% of sales on R&D and filing a new patent application every day.