India's Cement Industry: Meeting the Challenge of Emissions Abatement with Sustainable Growth

India is the world’s second-largest producer of cement with a capacity 409 MT/annum (2023) which is projected to reach 1139 MT by 2070. Increase in demand of cement in India is driven by rapid growth of infrastructure and housing within a rapidly growing national economy. Cement is a commodity whose production entails huge emissions of GHG and resource depletion. This study aims to understand the implication of increasing production of cement on India’s emission landscape and attempts to project when India can hope to flatten and bend the emission curve resulting from this sector. We use life cycle assessment tool (LCA) focusing on direct (Process emissions) and indirect emissions from the Indian cement manufacturing process with the present scenario (Business as usual; BAU) and technological interventions over a decadal time scale (till 2070) to examine the emission intensity and environmental impacts. The BAU scenario, showed a significant elevation in emission intensity and environmental impacts by a factor of ~3 by 2070. Energy demand could rise to 87 terawatt-hours to power the Indian cement industry and mineral resource extraction could be as high as (2.05E+9 kg Cueq) for manufacturing the needed cement. Further, the carbon footprint of ordinary Portland cement and their environmental sustainability, covering technological interventions from present to 2070, and a set of potential technologies to reduce impacts within the planetary boundaries (PBs) are discussed. The suggested interventions have the potential to reduce emissions by approximately 78% over the base year of 2023. Therefore, reprioritizing the traditional practices is important for the Indian cement industry to achieve goals of improved sustainability targets. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first attempt to project the emission intensity of cement production in India from 2030-2070 and to identify the decarbonization strategies that needs to be implemented to reduce the emission intensity in a progressive manner to place the Indian cement industry on a robust path to sustainability.