That coincidence is worth noting. China is the world leader in commercial coal gasification, while India is preparing to commit crores of rupees to take the technology into new territory — from simply burning coal-derived gas to making chemicals and fuels from it.
Coal is what India has in abundance (it also has thorium, but that is fuel for another day). India must use coal in an environmentally benign way. The answer is coal gasification — an area where China has technology and six decades of experience.
India is targeting 100 million tonnes of coal gasification capacity by 2030, which the government’s new ₹37,500-crore scheme aims to support. But the aim is to produce syngas and downstream products such as urea, methanol, ammonia, hydrogen and synthetic natural gas.
India should use the opening to explore access to Chinese coal gasification technology, says Roger Kumar, founder of CASE Group, which has worked with coal gasification for several years.
“China is much more advanced and mature in coal gasification technology,” Kumar told businessline. China has been working on the technology for more than 60 years and has developed not just gasifiers but also an ecosystem around them, including chemicals, fertilisers and other downstream industries, he said.
100 million tonnes done
“The government is talking about gasifying 100 million tonnes of coal. I can say with a lot of responsibility that India has already gasified 100 mt of coal,” Kumar said.However, there is a difference between what India has already been doing with coal gasification and what the new government programme seeks to achieve.
India has long used gasifiers for coal-to-thermal applications. Air and steam are generally used as gasifying agents, producing a nitrogen-rich combustible gas, commonly called ‘producer gas‘, which can be burnt for industrial heat.
The new programme is essentially about coal-to-chemicals. Here the objective is to produce syngas of controlled composition to serve as a chemical feedstock. Oxygen, rather than air, is used along with steam to avoid introducing nitrogen from air into the syngas, making it a more suitable feedstock for chemical production. The gasification process also operates at different pressures, temperatures and scales.
“The gasification itself is the common technology, but coal-to-thermal and coal-to-chemical are two different applications, with different requirements for the gasifier and the gas produced,” Kumar said.
As coal-to-chemicals kicks off in India, the question is whether India can develop the necessary technology quick and cheap.
This is where China can help. NITI Aayog’s 2025 workshop on gasification of India’s high-ash coal had noted that Chinese manufacturers have become leaders in entrained-flow gasifiers, while China has successfully built a large gasification industry despite having relatively high-ash coal. At the same time, the NITI Aayog report cautioned that India’s coal, with ash content often in the 30-45 per cent range, presents special challenges involving ash chemistry, equipment matching and operations.
That means no scope for using an off-the-shelf gasifier. The technology would have to work with Indian coal.
But Kumar argues that India should learn from China’s experience, rather than spending decades developing the technology from scratch.
There is already a precedent. Talcher Fertilisers’ coal gasification project has involved Chinese engineering expertise. Incidentally, Talcher Fertilizers is one of the seven applicants under the new incentive scheme.
The government, meanwhile, has made its scheme technology-agnostic and says indigenous technologies are encouraged. It expects the programme to catalyse investments worth ₹2.5-3 lakh crore.
The question, therefore, is not whether India should become self-reliant in gasification but how quickly it can become self-reliant — and whether using the best technology available globally, including from China, can get it there faster.
With Xi soon to arrive in Delhi, the question acquires an immediate diplomatic as well as industrial relevance.
Published on September 11, 2026
