COAL VS PETROLEUM AS ENERGY SOURCE FOR INDIA

Amalesh Sirkar, Biswajit Mandal

Abstract: Coal as such has been used in Power Plant as a fuel for long and can be converted to liquid fuel in a coal liquefaction plant to supply Naphtha for Petrochemical Industries and Diesel and Petrol for running vehicles. The cost of producing liquid from coal ranges from $ 35 to $ 60 / bbl whereas crude Petroleum derived similar products’ cost vary anywhere from $ 50 to $ 100/bbl mainly due to crude price variation in International Market since the processing cost of crude in a Refinery is nominal i.e. It varies from $ 1 to $ 1.5 / bbl under Indian scenario. However, under Indian scenario coal ash handling and disposal is a major problem due to high ash coal in a coal Refinery whereas in a petroleum Refinery there is no such problem. Since in India Petroleum Reserve is very little in comparism to demand of Petroleum Products and in order to meet the demand crude petroleum is imported from Middle Eastern countries there is huge drainage of India’s Foreign Exchange. Thus, coal may be an alternative under Indian scenario since coal reserve in India is about 300 billion tons out of which 50% is Bituminous coal that can be easily liquefied to various products as mentioned above. In this article comprehensive discussions on different aspects of a coal refinery and that of a Petroleum Refinery have been presented

Keywords: Coal, Petroleum, Indian Reserve;

DOI: https://doi.org/10.15623/ijret.2016.0513010