Amit Banka, Founder and CEO, WeNaturalists, discusses the success of CCUS depends on collaboration, carbon literacy and shared digital ecosystems rather than isolated technologies.
India’s cement industry churns out roughly
340 million tonnes annually. It is the lifeline of our infrastructure, the backbone of our urban aspirations, and the reason our highways connect villages to cities. But here lies an uncomfortable truth: every tonne of cement produced emits nearly one tonne of CO2. The industry accounts for 5.8 per cent of India’s total carbon emissions—a figure that challenges even the most committed sustainability advocates.
We stand at a peculiar crossroads. India’s infrastructure ambitions roar forward with plans for highways, hospitals, schools, and homes to serve 1.4 billion people. Simultaneously, the climate emergency demands action at unprecedented scales. The cement industry cannot simply reduce production. Yet it must transform. This is where Carbon Capture, Utilisation and Storage (CCUS) enters—not as a distant fantasy, but as urgent infrastructure for change.
India’s CCUS moment has arrived
It is encouraging that India has moved beyond treating CCUS as laboratory theory. The Department of Science and Technology (DST) has launched five carbon capture and utilisation testbeds specifically within the cement sector, representing the first such integrated cluster initiative in India. These are not token projects. They bring together premier research institutions—IIT Bombay, IIT Kanpur, IIT Madras—with cement leaders including JSW Cement, Dalmia Cement, and UltraTech, structured through an innovative Public-Private Partnership model.
Each testbed attacks a different dimension. One transforms CO2 into lightweight construction blocks. Another employs mineralisation techniques, literally converting pollution into solid minerals. A third uses vacuum swing adsorption technology to separate captured CO2 from cement kiln gases. Together, they represent India’s first real attempt at institutionalising CCUS for hard-to-abate sectors.
The Global Cement and Concrete Association (GCCA) India, collaborating with TERI, has released India’s decarbonisation roadmap targeting net-zero CO2 emissions by 2070. Alongside government support and industry commitment, there now exists a structured pathway. Yet a critical question lingers: what will determine whether this remains a blueprint or becomes lived reality?
The answer: platforms that connect, literacy that educates, and ecosystems that accelerate.
Breaking the silo trap: Why collaboration platforms matter
Consider the challenge that keeps cement plant managers awake: CCUS economics do not work in isolation. A cement plant capturing CO2 must find somewhere to store it. Transport costs become prohibitive if storage sites are distant. Utilisation opportunities for captured CO2—whether in enhanced oil recovery, chemicals production, or building materials—scatter across different industries and geographies. The traditional model—where each facility independently solves its own emissions problem—fails spectacularly when costs explode and timelines extend endlessly.
This is precisely where industrial hubs reshape the game.
Collaborative CCUS hubs concentrate captured carbon from multiple emitters, transport it through shared pipeline infrastructure, and coordinate utilisation and storage at scale. The Nordics have already validated this approach. Norway’s Northern Lights project receives CO2 from various industrial emitters, centralises management, and delivers offshore sequestration—reducing per-tonne costs substantially and making the business case credible.
In India, GCCA and DST explicitly emphasise hub identification and development potential, particularly recognising that certain regions possess optimal clustering opportunities. Yet hubs cannot materialise through goodwill alone. They require coordination across cement manufacturers, technology providers, logistics operators, carbon verification agencies, and government regulators—stakeholders with different incentives, geographies, and timelines. This is where collaborative digital platforms become essential infrastructure. When a cement manufacturer explores CCUS partnerships, when researchers seek industrial pilot sites, when policymakers track implementation progress across regions—these activities demand platforms that create real-time visibility and alignment.
Platforms like WeNaturalists recognise that climate action cannot thrive in information silos. The ability to facilitate multi-stakeholder collaborations, enable geographic discovery, manage complex projects transparently, and connect professionals horizontally creates conditions for faster partnership formation and deployment. Here is the essential insight: cement’s CCUS future depends less on any single breakthrough technology than on structures that connect the innovators, implementers, financiers, and regulators who will collectively bring CCUS to scale. Collaborative platforms are that connective infrastructure.
Carbon literacy crisis: Why knowledge is hard infrastructure
Spend time in any cement plant, and an interesting pattern emerges. Senior managers articulate climate commitments at macro levels. Plant engineers master their equipment intimately. Yet the connective tissue—the shared language about embodied carbon, capture methodologies, utilisation economics, and storage verification—often feels startlingly thin.
This is not knowledge scarcity. It is literacy scarcity. Carbon literacy means more than understanding that CO2 harms the climate. It means cement professionals grasping why their specific plant’s emissions profile matters, how different CCUS technologies trade off between energy consumption and capture rates, where utilisation opportunities align with their operational reality, and what governance frameworks ensure verified, permanent carbon sequestration.
Cement manufacturing contributes approximately 8 per cent of global carbon emissions. Addressing this requires professionals who understand CCUS deeply enough to make capital decisions, troubleshoot implementation challenges, and convince boards to invest substantial capital.
Current training pathways exist. The Decarbonising Cement Manufacture Course provides comprehensive six-week programmes covering capture technologies and energy efficiency. Specialist trainers offer bespoke carbon programmes for construction professionals. Yet in India’s cement sector, systematic carbon literacy infrastructure remains patchy. This creates a bottleneck: adoption lags not because the technology is unproven, but because insufficient professionals understand it well enough to champion deployment.
Consider the DST testbeds through a different lens: they are not merely technology incubators. They are the training grounds for India’s first generation of CCUS practitioners. These researchers, engineers, and technicians will migrate across the sector, carrying deep understanding of capture chemistry, operational protocols, verification procedures, and economic models. They become multipliers—transforming isolated expertise into distributed, sector-wide capability.
The cement industry must embed carbon literacy systematically. This means formal training programmes, industry forums for peer learning, and platforms connecting practitioners horizontally so they absorb lessons from others’ implementation journeys. When professionals understand not just their speciality but the broader CCUS ecosystem, they accelerate adoption across the entire value chain.
This is precisely why WeNaturalists’ emphasis on upskilling and awareness programs aligns so powerfully with cement’s decarbonisation challenge. Platforms that connect professionals, facilitate knowledge sharing, and highlight career pathways in climate solutions create the enabling environment for literacy to flourish.
Digital rcosystems as acceleration infrastructure
Visualise this scenario: An IIT team develops a catalyst improving CO2 capture efficiency by 15 per cent. A cement manufacturer in Maharashtra plans a CCUS retrofit. A logistics company specialises in cryogenic transport. A carbon verification agency operates across multiple projects. A development bank seeks green cement opportunities. A cement associations’ innovation team seeks to track
emerging solutions.
Without coordinated digital infrastructure, this innovation journey takes years—if it occurs at all. Findings get published in journals. The cement company never learns about them. The logistics operator never discovers the opportunity. The capital provider never assembles the deal. With digital ecosystems, this timeline collapses. Innovation visibility becomes immediate. Partnerships form faster. Capital confidence increases. Implementation accelerates.
Digital ecosystems serve critical functions in CCUS scaling. They make R&D outputs visible to industry practitioners in real-time, not confined to academic journals or conference abstracts. When one cement plant solves an operational challenge with CCUS, others learn instantly rather than independently rediscovering the solution. They create transparency around carbon accounting and verification, building credibility in carbon credits and storage durability. They coordinate fragmented supply chains—capture, transport, utilisation, and storage—from isolated silos into functioning value chains.
The DST testbeds represent networked innovation clusters. Their impact multiplies exponentially if findings flow through digital platforms. When IIT Bombay’s catalyst-based system produces operational data, that intelligence should reach cement manufacturers, equipment suppliers, and policymakers in real-time, not wait for annual reports.
WeNaturalists infrastructure for project management, community building, network transparency, and cross-geographic data analysis exemplifies this approach. The platform enables research-to-deployment acceleration by making opportunities visible, connecting capabilities with challenges, and providing data infrastructure for monitoring progress.
There is an additional dimension often overlooked. Digital platforms democratise opportunity access. A researcher in a Tier-2 city discovers CCUS projects globally. A cement worker interested in green skills finds training opportunities. A small-scale equipment supplier gains visibility to larger ecosystem players. This is not charity; it is economic efficiency—leveraging India’s entire talent pool for decarbonisation
rather than concentrating opportunities among established incumbents.
The inflection point
India’s cement industry occupies a remarkable moment. CCUS technology pathways are mapped. Government support flows through DST testbeds and NITI Aayog coordination. Industry commitment is visible in the GCCA roadmap. What determines whether these align into scaled deployment? Three interlocking elements.
First: Collaborative platforms that align stakeholder incentives and reduce transaction costs for partnership formation.
Second: Carbon literacy programmes that upskill the workforce beyond their specialised roles toward integrated understanding of the entire decarbonisation ecosystem.
Third: Digital ecosystems that accelerate research-to-deployment cycles, create transparency, and democratise opportunity access.
None suffice independently. Technology without collaboration becomes orphaned innovation. Collaboration without literacy moves glacially.
Both without digital infrastructure remain invisible and fragmented.
India’s cement industry has always embodied stories of scale—scaled production, scaled infrastructure, scaled built environments. The next chapter must be scale coupled with wisdom: the wisdom to connect what requires connecting, educate what requires educating, and accelerate what requires accelerating.
Platforms like WeNaturalists understand this intuitively. They do not seek to replace traditional industry structures or government roles. Instead, they provide connective tissue allowing research, regulation, investment, implementation, and continuous learning to move in concert.
India’s decarbonisation pathway for cement depends less on any single innovation than on our collective ability to connect, learn, and accelerate together. The technology is ready. The moment is now. What remains is building—and building better—the platforms and people networks that transform ambition into action.
About the author:
Amit Banka, Founder and CEO, WeNaturalists, is a business builder and ecosystem creator focused on driving nature-positive growth by combining media, digital platforms, sustainability, and strategic investments.
