Editorial 1: India’s fossil fuel lessons for net zero
Context:
- India has walked over the journey from upstream (exploration and production) petroleum sector to clean energy during the last four decades.
- As in recent time, in 2020, PM Narendra Modi introduced the production-linked incentive (PLI) scheme to incentivise investment, inter alia, in the minerals, components and equipment required for the generation and consumption of clean energy.
- It is mainly driven by the strategic imperative to reduce India’s exposure to external supply shocks
A journey from self-sufficient fossil fuel energy system to a self-reliant (Atmanirbhar) clean energy system. : There are four relevant learnings during the last four decades for the transition toward self-reliant (atmanirbhar) clean energy system.
1.First, the liberalisation of upstream petroleum did not bridge the gap between the domestic demand for petroleum and indigenous supply.
- There are many reasons for this but the one that has relevance for clean energy is it is not enough to have raw materials.
- The surrounding economic, technical and operating ecosystem must enable their conversion into commercially-useful products
- The surrounding economic, technical and operating ecosystem must enable their conversion into commercially-useful products. India has the raw material of oil and gas
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- But hydrocarbon resources are located in harsh terrain and complex geology. They are, therefore, difficult to locate and even when located they are difficult to produce on a commercial basis.
- This is because of the high cost of drilling and development. In consequence, a large percentage of discovered hydrocarbons have not been produced.
- Transposed onto the clean energy sector don not presume that the availability of technical talent and capital will be enough to create a world-class hub for the manufacture of batteries, solar cells, wafers and modules.
- The system will also have to minimise the avoidable costs associated with procedural red tape — land acquisition, erratic supplies of water and power and legal redress.
2. Recovery rate of oil and gas from India’s producing fields has averaged between 25-30 per cent.
- This means that for every 100 molecules discovered, only 25-30 have been brought to the surface. The recovery rate of fields of comparable geology across the world is between 40-60 per cent.
- The reason for this difference is not access to Enhanced oil recovery ( EOR ) technologies. These are available mostly off the shelf. The reason is the utilisation of these technologies. These have not been efficiently implemented.
- Therefore, It need to understand that clean energy sector must not presume that technology is in of itself the sine qua non for manufacturing competitiveness. It has to be efficiently utilised.
- China’s dominance of the clean energy value chain — 90 per cent of the global market share in silicon wafers; 85 per cent in PV solar cells, and 80 per cent in PV solar modules is because its process engineers have perfected the implementation of the several technological steps required to convert raw material into end product
3. Third, the liberalisation of EP triggered the expectation there would be a flood of investor interest.
- This did not happen because international companies regarded our geology as high risk and because they did not think our fiscal and commercial terms were internationally competitive. Their response to the invitation to bid for exploration licences was muted.
- Therefore, in renewable sector The endeavour should be to lower entry barriers, ease business conditions and remove the perception that India offers a high-cost operating environment
4. Finally, as indicated, India remains dependent on the external market for supplies of petroleum.
- There is no geological magic wand by which to reverse this imbalance and address its vulnerability to unexpected supply disruptions
- As a result, with the increase in multiple sources of supply the chances of disruption will decrease and it is also a less of a concern today than when the Middle East had a stranglehold over supplies
Conclusion:
- Therefore, the lesson for the clean energy sector is two-fold. One, like oil, clean energy minerals and components are internationally traded.
- There can be purchased on the international market. The country should desist therefore from building a high-cost, domestic, clean energy hub that is forever dependent on subsidies.
- And two, given that China is the lowest-cost supplier of clean energy components, India should continue with its two-track policy. One track will pit us eye-ball-to-eye-ball on the border, the other should strengthen our trading relationship. Along with international cooperation such as India and China can help each other meet their net-zero carbon obligations
Editorial 2: ISRO’s Reusable Launch Vehicle Mission RLV LEX
Recent Context:
- Recently, Indian Space Research Organisation and its partners successfully demonstrated a precise landing experiment for a Reusable Launch Vehicle at the Aeronautical Test Range (ATR), Chitradurga, Karnataka.
- The Reusable Launch Vehicle Autonomous Landing Mission (RLV LEX) test was the second of five tests that are a part of ISRO’s efforts to develop RLVs, or space planes/shuttles, which can travel to low earth orbits to deliver payloads and return to earth for use again.
What is ISRO’s RLV TD project?
- According to ISRO, the series of experiments with the winged RLV-TD are part of efforts at “developing essential technologies for a fully reusable launch vehicle to enable low-cost access to space”.
- The RLV-TD will be used to develop technologies like hypersonic flight (HEX), autonomous landing (LEX), return flight experiment (REX), powered cruise flight, and Scramjet Propulsion Experiment (SPEX).
- According to ISRO. “In the future, this vehicle will be scaled up to become the first stage of India’s reusable two-stage orbital (TSTO) launch vehicle,”
- ISRO’s RLV-TD looks like an aircraft. It consists of a fuselage, a nose cap, double delta wings, and twin vertical tails.
- The 2016 experiment involved sending a winged spacecraft on a rocket powered by a conventional solid booster (HS9) engine used by ISRO into space. The spacecraft traveled at a speed of Mach 5 (five times the speed of sound) when re-entering the earth’s orbit and traveled a distance of 450 km before splashdown in the Bay of Bengal.
How advanced are RLV technologies globally?
- Reusable space vehicles have been in existence for a long time with NASA space shuttles carrying out dozens of human space flight missions.
- The use case for reusable space launch vehicles has revived with the private space launch services provider Space X demonstrating partially reusable launch systems with its Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets since 2017. SpaceX is also working on a fully reusable launch vehicle system called Starship.
How old is the RLV project?
- One of the first trials of an RLV was announced by ISRO as far back as 2010, but was put off due to technical reasons. Another was hinted at in 2015 but was again grounded over technical issues.
- ISRO’s RLV development program took a backseat at the agency as much of the attention in recent years was focussed on the development of the heavy lift Geosynchronous Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV) and its high-end version, the GSLV-Mk III, to enable ISRO to break into the lucrative market for launching large communication satellites weighing over 2,000 kg.
- Finally, the first trial of the RLV-TD was conducted on May 23, 2016.
What was the first RLV experiment about?
- In the first flight, “critical technologies such as autonomous navigation, guidance and control, reusable thermal protection system, and re-entry mission management was successfully validated,
And what was the second experiment conducted recently?
- The RLV LEX test on Sunday involved a Chinook Helicopter of the Indian Air Force lifting the RLV LEX to a height of 4.5 km and releasing the RLV, based on a command from Mission Management Computer.
- After midair release, the RLV carried out an autonomous landing “under the exact conditions of a Space Re-entry vehicle’s landing — high speed, unmanned, precise landing from the same return path as if the vehicle arrived from space
- And the landing parameters such as ground relative velocity, the sink rate of landing gears, and precise body rates, as might be experienced by an orbital re-entry space vehicle in its return path, were achieved.
What was the difference in the two tests?
- According to ISRO, the first test with RLV-TD (HEX1) involved the vehicle landing on a hypothetical runway over the Bay of Bengal while the LEX experiment on Sunday involved a precise landing on a runway.
- The LEX mission achieved the final approach phase that coincided with the re-entry return flight path exhibiting an autonomous, high speed (350 km per hour) landing.
- Three more experiments — return flight experiment (REX), powered cruise flight, and Scramjet Propulsion Experiment (SPEX) — have to be conducted.
What are its advantages?
- With the costs acting as a major deterrent to space exploration, a reusable launch vehicle is considered a low-cost, reliable, and on-demand mode of accessing space.
- “Nearly 80 to 87 percent of the cost in a space launch vehicle goes into the structure of the vehicle.
- The costs of propellants are minimal in comparison. By using RLVs the cost of a launch can be reduced by nearly 80 percent of the present cost,”