Write a brief note on Carbon capture and storage. Mention its potential benefits and discuss the challenges that need to be addressed for its wide-scale deployment in India.

Carbon capture and storage is a new technology for Carbon mitigation. It not only allows to capture of carbon but also stores it in reserves, locking it for hundreds of years. It is very effective to achieve climate change mitigation.

Carbon capture and storage can take place through various strategies such as injecting carbon into basalt rocks or deep sea floor, etc.

Benefits:

• Climate change mitigation with a strong impact on global warming by significantly reducing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.
• It can also be used to exploit oil resources from wells that have depleted or have low reserves.
• Make Biochar, which can be used for soil amendment and can also convert to fossil resources for future use.

However, the use of this technology in India faces several challenges:

• It is a new and less developed technology with very high costs involved.
• Currently, Industries do not follow capturing norm of MoEFCC.
• Policy push by the government is not present.

Seeing the immense potential of CCS Technology to achieve climate mitigation, India should focus on research and development of this technology indigenously. Global collaboration with countries like China, which suffer from similar problems of air pollution, carbon emissions rise, etc, can be made. Also, it would help to achieve INDC targets under UNFCCC.