Minerals and Energy Resources
Conventional energy
Describe India's conventional energy sources and where they are found.
Energy for everything. We need energy to cook, to light and heat our homes, to run vehicles and machines. Two groups:
- Conventional: firewood, cattle dung cake, coal, petroleum, natural gas, electricity (hydel and thermal).
- Non-conventional: solar, wind, tidal, geothermal, biogas, atomic energy.
In villages, firewood and dung cake meet more than 70 per cent of household energy needs. But forests are shrinking, and burning dung wastes manure that farms need.
Coal: India's most plentiful fossil fuel. Coal forms when plant material is pressed down over millions of years. How good it is depends on how deep it was buried, for how long, and how hot it got:
- peat: from decaying plants in swamps; little carbon, lots of moisture, low heat;
- lignite: soft, brown, low-grade; main reserves at Neyveli (Tamil Nadu), used for electricity;
- bituminous: buried deeper and heated more; the most used coal. Its best form, metallurgical coal, is used to smelt iron in blast furnaces;
- anthracite: the highest quality, hard coal.
Two ages of coal.
- Gondwana coal, a little over 200 million years old: metallurgical coal in the Damodar valley (Jharia, Raniganj, Bokaro) and the Godavari, Mahanadi, Son and Wardha valleys.
- Tertiary coal, about 55 million years old: in Meghalaya, Assam, Arunachal Pradesh and Nagaland.
Coal is bulky and loses weight when burnt (it turns to ash), so heavy industries and thermal power stations are built on or near the coalfields.
Petroleum. India's next biggest energy source after coal. It gives fuel, lubricants for machines, and raw material for many industries; refineries are a 'nodal industry' for synthetic textiles, fertilisers and chemicals. Oil is trapped in rock:
- in anticlines: rock layers bent upwards like an arch; oil collects at the top, held in by layers it cannot pass through;
- in fault traps, where rocks have cracked and shifted.
Gas is lighter, so it sits above the oil. Main areas: Mumbai High, Gujarat (Ankaleshwar is the key field) and Assam, the oldest oil state (Digboi, Naharkatiya, Moran-Hugrijan).
Natural gas. Found with petroleum. Used for power, industry, fertilisers, and now as CNG for vehicles and PNG for cooking at home. Main reserves: Mumbai High and nearby fields, the Cambay basin, and new finds in the Krishna-Godavari basin. The first big pipeline, the Hazira-Vijaipur-Jagdishpur (HVJ), was 1,700 km long. India's network has grown to about 18,500 km and will soon link the whole country, including the north-east, into one gas grid.
Electricity: two ways to make it.
- Hydel: fast-flowing water turns turbines. Water is renewable. Examples: Bhakra Nangal, Damodar Valley Corporation, Kopili Hydel Project.
- Thermal: burning coal, petroleum or natural gas turns turbines. These fuels are non-renewable.
Once made, the electricity is exactly the same. How much electricity each person uses is seen as a sign of how developed a country is.
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