India is targeting a GDP growth rate of over 8% per annum. To sustain this rate of growth in the domestic economy, and also to establish and maintain a competitive edge in the global economy, it is essential that we ensure availability of uninterrupted energy supply at reasonable cost across the nation. This is a daunting task, particularly when we consider the present-day energy scenario in India and compare it in the global perspective.

Apart from the rapidly rising trends in overall energy consumption, another concern is the breakdown of energy consumption by fuel type. While concern for the environment is pushing India towards using ‘clean’ and ‘green’ energy, i.e., the renewables, they still constitute a relatively tiny fraction of the energy consumption. In other words, India is still heavily dependent on fossil fuels for her energy needs. Note also that, while India is the third largest consumer of energy and is heavily dependent on fossil fuels for meeting her energy demands, its indigenous production of the same is relatively small and has remained more or less stagnant over the last decade or so, making the country’s economy vulnerable to geopolitical manipulations.

What the above overall energy scenario tells us is this: While India continues to search for renewable options to satisfy her energy needs, her dependence on fossil energy resources will continue unabated at least for the foreseeable future. What this also means is that we do not have the choice of selectively harnessing energy resources. Instead, what we need is an integrated approach towards exploiting our energy resources to achieve better and sustainable energy security for our country.

While attaining energy security for our country is our ultimate goal and while we continue to develop technologies for exploitation of available energy resources to achieve that goal, we also need to be cognizant of the environmental impacts of those technologies. For example, realizing our overdependence on fossil fuels for meeting our energy demands, we may need to focus on developing environment-friendly energy production technologies (geothermal or enhanced geothermal resources). At the same time, we need to focus on reducing the adverse impacts of using fossil fuels by exploring ways to reduce their environmental impacts (e.g., using technologies such as carbon capture utilization and sequestration, CCUS). Furthermore, most energy extraction technologies (conventional or otherwise) often require large volumes of fresh water, which also necessitates handling, management, and ultimate disposal of contaminated water in large quantities.

In other words, there exists a close relationship between energy extraction processes and other valuable natural resources (e.g., water and the environment, in general). CEEER is aimed at understanding these inter-relationships and develop technologies that will provide low-cost, sustainable energy with minimal environmental footprint. While several centres exist in the country that are performing energy- and environment-related research, we believe the CEEER is a first-of-a-kind in that it intends to adopt a futuristic and holistic approach towards energy resources exploitation and environmental management.