Rajat Singhal, Chairman & Managing Director, Hughes & Hughes Chem Limited | Director, Anytech Hughes Climate Solutions Pvt. Ltd.

Climate funds and multilateral lenders keep searching India for decarbonisation projects with genuine cash flows; CCU is where they exist.

September 24, 2026. By News Bureau

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Rajat Singhal

Anytech Hughes Climate Solutions Pvt. Ltd.

Climate funds

Decarbonisation projects

Greenhouse Gas Emission

Grant-dependent

Carbon management

Growth Opportunity

India has quietly settled the question of whether carbon management is coming to its industry. NITI Aayog's CCUS policy framework named cement, steel and petrochemicals as priority sectors years ago; the Department of Science and Technology has since stood up the country's first carbon capture and utilisation testbeds with cement majors like UltraTech, Dalmia, JK Cement and JSW as industry partners; and the Greenhouse Gas Emission Intensity Target Rules have made emission intensity a legally binding number for hundreds of industrial units, cement plants foremost among them, with tradable credits for outperformance and penalties for shortfall. The open question is no longer whether. It is how fast — and whether Indian industry treats carbon management as a compliance expense to be minimised or a business to be built.

I would argue strongly for the second reading, with one condition: the pathway that scales in India will be Carbon Capture and Utilisation — CCU — not storage. Storage asks a plant to pay forever for pipelines, injection and monitoring, in exchange for nothing saleable. Utilisation asks the same plant to convert its carbon and its carbon-bearing residues into products with real markets. One of these is a permanent cost centre; the other can clear an investment committee. It is telling that every one of the DST's new testbeds is a utilisation project; not one proposes to bury anything.

Our own work at Anytech Hughes Climate Solutions, our Indo-Korean joint venture with Anytech Co., Ltd. of South Korea, has convinced me the opportunity is real and nearer than most boards assume. The platform we brought from Korea — where it runs commercially at reference cement plants — uses a plant's own stack CO₂ to mineralise chlorine bypass dust from high-AFR cement kilns, yielding potassium chloride above 99 percent purity and recycled calcium carbonate that returns to the process. The same chemistry extends to other residues: we are currently engaged on a 36,000 TPA fly ash CO₂ mineral carbonation proposal with a leading Indian refining and petrochemicals company, and on a slag carbonation feasibility, initiated through a formal RFP, with one of India's largest steel producers, where captured CO₂ becomes carbonated aggregates. Potash, calcium carbonate, aggregates — three waste streams, three product markets, one platform. That is what a carbon management business looks like. But getting from promising projects to a national industry requires four things to fall into place.

First: Measure the Resource Correctly

Every CCU project begins with characterising a waste stream, and we have repeatedly seen project economics swing several-fold on measurement methodology alone, the analytical method used to determine chloride in bypass dust, for instance, can understate recoverable value dramatically. India needs standard, mandated protocols for characterising industrial residues — bypass dust, fly ash, slag — so that feasibility decisions are made on comparable, defensible numbers. Many projects dismissed as unviable were simply measured wrong.

Second: Certify the Products, and the Markets will Follow

A CCU project lives or dies on offtake. Recovered potash competes with imported muriate of potash, of which India imports its entire requirement, around four million tonnes a year — so the market exists; what is needed is BIS-grade certification so recovered KCl flows into fertiliser and industrial channels without friction. The precedent is already on the ground: when the Ministry of Steel, on NITI Aayog's directives, backed CSIR-CRRI's work on processed steel slag, India got its first slag-built road at Hazira and a formal pathway for a by-product into public procurement. Mineralised carbonates and CO₂-cured aggregates deserve the same fast-tracked treatment.

Third: Make Projects Bankable, Not Grant-dependent

CCU's structural advantage is that its projects can be appraised like any capital investment — on payback — with revenue from product sales stacked on top of avoided disposal costs and, now, carbon credit value under the CCTS. Climate funds and multilateral lenders keep searching India for decarbonisation projects with genuine cash flows; CCU is where they exist. What would accelerate them is priority sector-style recognition, credit enhancement for first-of-a-kind plants, and clarity that CCU-abated tonnes count fully within a plant's GEI compliance arithmetic.

Fourth: Partner for Technology, but Localise the Execution

India does not need to reinvent chemistry that already runs at commercial scale abroad. Korea confronted high-AFR bypass dust before we did and solved it; that is a decade of learning available today. But the model through which technology crosses borders matters enormously, and here our own journey is instructive. The Hughes–Anytech relationship did not begin with carbon. It began with industrial air purification — Anytech's original discipline — brought into Indian applications on the home ground where Hughes & Hughes has executed engineering contracts since 1991. Working trust matured, through KOTRA's Korea–India business corridor, into Anytech Hughes Climate Solutions: a 51:49 joint venture in which Korean process technology and reference-plant experience sit on one side, and three decades of Indian engineering, project delivery and industrial relationships on the other. Earlier this year our first cement-sector MOU was signed at the Korea–India Business Partnership ceremony in New Delhi, on the sidelines of the Korean presidential state visit. The lesson we draw from this journey: not equipment import through a distributor, but genuine joint ventures — Indian equipment sourcing, Indian project delivery, jointly owned outcomes. That structure keeps costs at Indian levels, builds domestic capability, and gives global technology partners real skin in the Indian game.

The Growth Opportunity

Put these four together and carbon management stops looking like a tax and starts looking like what it is: a new industrial vertical. Hundreds of obligated plants now carry a statutory carbon number. Every one of them also carries waste streams that CCU can convert into revenue — while improving that number. The countries that lead the next decade of heavy industry will be those that learned to refine carbon, not bury it. India has the mandate, the technology partnerships and the markets. What remains is speed.

- Rajat Singhal, Chairman & Managing Director, Hughes & Hughes Chem Limited | Director, Anytech Hughes Climate Solutions Pvt. Ltd.