A little more on the subject of “clean coal” technology and its status as a holy grail in countries where coal appears to be an unavoidably important energy source in the coming decades.

The last post focused on a proof of concept in China. (Hopefully the testing is yielding usable data and not just good P.R.) Today, I just wanted to share some nuggets on recent activity across the Himalaya in neighboring India.

Fresh in the news are plans for an unspecified Indo-French tie-up in clean coal. According to this brief report in the Hindu, the Minister of State for Power is talking up plans to leverage French company Alstom in clean coal the way India is working with France’s Areva in nuclear. Although some sort of agreement was hinted, the report gave disappointingly few details.

But also in recent months, US-based EnergyQuest announced that it had been tapped to provide coal-gasification technology for two plants just east of Mumbai with total generation capacity of 1,200 megawatts. (Details in this article from greentechmedia.) EnergyQuest’s CEO is quoted as saying the gasification process increases the efficiency of coal use by 30% and removes as much as 20% of the carbon that would normally end up flowing out of the plant smokestack into the atmosphere — but there’s a catch. Even he admits no proven means exists at present to store the captured carbon, with underground sequestration remaining only a “theoretical” option.

Sound familiar?