Tucked among forested slopes and pristine valleys in a corner of northeastern India, young villagers have been busy knocking on doors – hoping to convince sceptical elders that graphite mining would bring much-needed jobs to their distant region.
“The youth in our village migrate to cities for work. What’s better than to have jobs near home?” Gollo Doni, a farmer and secretary of the local youth association, told Climate Home News as he and other members in their 20s discussed the latest meetings between locals and representatives of Oil India Limited (OIL), a state company exploring graphite and vanadium reserves in Arunachal Pradesh.
The mining plans in the state, which is home to more than one-third of India’s graphite reserves and the subject of a sovereignty dispute with China, reflect a push by the Indian government to position itself as a leading producer of battery-grade graphite as the mass rollout of batteries for electric vehicles (EVs) and power storage drives demand for the mineral.
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An average electric car contains about 60 kg of graphite anode materials, according to the International Energy Agency, and the graphite supply chain is heavily dominated by China, which produces about 80% of the world’s natural graphite and controls more than 90% of global refining.
As Western countries seek to reduce their dependency on China, India’s reserves of graphite and other minerals vital for the switch to clean energy have caught governments’ attention, with Germany signing a critical minerals partnership agreement in January.
Ambitious plans
But hurdles remain to India’s ambitious plans to ramp up critical minerals output, both to position itself as an alternative to China and to meet its own fast-growing needs.
India has a target for 30% of new vehicle sales to be electric by 2030, and demand for EV lithium batteries looks set to surge close to 35-fold between 2023 and 2035, according to S&P Global Mobility, driven by growth in two- and three-wheelers in the country of 1.4 billion people.
Although domestic manufacturing of EV batteries is expanding, the sector remains at an early stage and India depends heavily on imports from China, South Korea and Japan.
At the same time, it wants to get graphite processing off the ground, aiming to turn its reserves of the mineral – which rank among the world’s 10 biggest – into higher value battery-grade supplies.
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With exploration already underway, the next step should be starting discussions about developing processing facilities – including support from foreign partners, said Kaira Rakheja, South Asia energy analyst at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA).
“These exploration and extraction projects have a long gestation period. So even if discussions on processing start now, it will still take a while,” she said, noting India’s simultaneous push to create “rare earth corridors” encompassing every step of production.
Hurdles ahead
India’s graphite reserves are mainly of a lower grade, however, making processing for use in battery anodes more complex, while the country is a late entrant.
“We are not a big player in the market and have missed the bus,” said Aditya Ramji, director of the Global South Clean Transportation Centre at the University of California, Davis.
While exploration work is already underway at several sites in Arunachal Pradesh, and at some places in eastern and southern India, production will take at least two years to start, said Tana Tage, director at the Centre for the Earth Sciences and Himalayan Studies, OIL’s local partner and holder of a 10% stake in the Phop project.
A mine would create about 300 jobs and the project’s partners are discussing options for processing the site’s medium- to high-grade graphite locally, Tage added, despite voicing concern about a lack of technological know-how.
“India does not have the large-scale, advanced processing capabilities to achieve the ultra-high purity levels required for EV batteries and clean technologies,” he told Climate Home News.
Diversification drive
Despite such challenges, industry experts say India could benefit from the push to find sources of battery graphite other than China.
“We can’t beat China in this space, but we can still create a space for ourselves in buying and selling, as everyone is looking for a space to diversify,” said Rishabh Jain, fellow at the Council on Energy, Environment and Water, a New Delhi-based think-tank.
India’s government hopes the bilateral memorandum of understanding (MoU) signed with Germany could help.
As well as pledging cooperation on critical minerals exploration, the declaration envisions the exchange of know-how to add value through processing and recycling, facilitating investment and building the supply chain resilience of both countries. That could include identifying joint research projects and facilitating cooperation between industry players.
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“India and Germany will work together to mutually strengthen supply chains in the field of critical minerals,” a spokesperson for the German government’s energy strategy said. “We will encourage companies to build strong ties in terms of knowledge sharing, offtake agreements and investments.”
Germany is already supporting several domestic projects focused on converting graphite into battery anode material – valuable experience that could potentially be shared with India, said Rakheja. In return for shared technical expertise, India offers a strong pool of workforce talent and a big market.
“This way, both partners can look beyond China,” she said.
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The MoU, which is non-binding, is “a good start”, said Svenja Schöneich, a senior advisor at the NGO Germanwatch, adding that it was thin on details, including on how to add value to India’s critical mineral resources.
“The partnership document should figure out the problem of local value creation. It should also consider that it can’t really skip processing through China,” Schöneich said.
An official at India’s Mining Ministry did not respond to requests for comment.
Trade deals and tax breaks
Beyond the five-year German accord, India has implemented numerous policy measures aimed at securing its own supplies of critical minerals and adding value to its mineral exports, for example by signing favourable trade deals. Last year, India’s graphite was granted zero-duty access to the US, just as the tariffs on Chinese graphite imports climbed to a high 160%.
When the government announced the national budget in February, it included a raft of financial measures aimed at kickstarting a plan to process minerals domestically – the details of which are expected to be announced in the coming months.
They included zero customs duty on critical mineral inputs and enhanced tax deductions for exploration, while the government’s production-linked incentive (PLI) scheme allocated the equivalent of $1.87 billion to build domestic battery cell manufacturing.
Before that can happen, progress on new mining – such as the Arunachal Pradesh graphite projects – is vital, Jain said.
“We are in 2026, and looking to move towards a cleaner world. This is the future,” he said.
The state government in Arunachal Pradesh agrees. It called last year for fast-tracked environmental permitting for graphite projects, new infrastructure around mine sites and reforms to avoid legal disputes that could hold the sector back.
Back in the village of Phop, youth association secretary Doni said that while reluctant residents did not raise an objection to OIL’s preliminary exploration licence, he fears a bigger fight ahead.
Tage said up to 3,000 people could ultimately be displaced if the project proceeds, raising questions about whether economic benefits would outweigh the social and environmental costs.
“It has been difficult to make the elders agree to actual mining,” Doni said, as he and other young villagers sipped on sweet tea in a thatched mountain house. “We are trying to convince our elders that mining will not only bring resources for the nation, but bring us jobs here.”
The post India looks to untapped graphite riches for slice of critical minerals boom appeared first on Climate Home News.
India looks to untapped graphite riches for slice of critical minerals boom
Claver Gatete is Executive Secretary of the UN Economic Commission for Africa. Jason Veysey is Energy Modeling Program Director and Senior Scientist at the Stockholm Environment Institute. Lisa Sachs is Director of the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment at Columbia University.
The case for global energy transition has rarely been clearer. The closure of the Strait of Hormuz earlier this year exposed the cost of unplanned, fossil-dependent systems, while the falling cost of renewables, the rising penetration of electric vehicles, and the growing value of demand flexibility have made the direction of travel obvious. The benefits of a clean, secure, integrated system are no longer in dispute. What remains unclear is how to build it.
Countries around the world have called for faster renewable energy deployment and alternative energy arrangements. A secure, affordable, resilient, decarbonised system requires specific investments in specific places in a specific sequence, optimised across sectors and borders. But very few governments have the analytical foundation to translate those imperatives into investment.
The two instruments that are supposed to determine investment priorities for decarbonisation – Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) and country platforms – cannot answer the most basic question facing any country undertaking an energy transition: what should the energy system look like?
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To close this gap, every country needs a bankable, economy-wide optimisation model for its energy system. A model is not a plan, but it can help answer the critical question of what the future energy system should look like. It shows how optimal scenarios vary as assumptions and policies are adjusted, calculates investment requirements and sequencing, and quantifies how system costs are affected by assumptions, policies, and exogenous variables like trade policy and financing terms.
Tool for efficient investment
Optimisation is a simplified way of simulating an energy system, but it can be an extremely powerful tool for moving energy planning from reactive (how do we manage the disparate actions in the energy system?) to intentional (what energy system underpins our national objectives?). A model can show how optimal scenarios vary as assumptions and policies are adjusted, and how investment requirements are quantified and sequenced.
Optimisation models can treat the energy system and the sectors it serves as an integrated whole, optimising across sectors and projects in ways that can be mutually reinforcing. If considered independently, growth in industrial demand, transport electrification, and digital infrastructure can add stress to the energy system. But an optimised plan can arrange these and other changes in an efficient, synergistic way.
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New load can be added where low-cost power is available; industrial customers can ensure the viability of investments in energy supply; electric vehicle charging policy can smooth load curves and reduce costs for all consumers.
Additionally, optimisation modeling can also change the financeability of investments. Taken alone, each project faces uncertainty about the rest of the system, which raises the cost of capital and causes projects to stall or unwind after contracts are signed. A coherent, optimised plan makes visible the coordination that private capital would otherwise have to bet on: identified offtake, sequenced and committed transmission, contracted power supply, and so on.
What COP31 and COP32 should do
The upcoming COPs in Turkey and Ethiopia can shift the center of gravity of international climate cooperation from fragmented commitments to planning. Three moves are urgently needed.
First, optimised, economy-wide, long-term energy system planning must be the foundation on which any meaningful NDC, country platform, or finance commitment rests. NDCs are typically drafted by environment or single-line ministries, with limited cross-sectoral input from ministries of energy, finance, and planning. They contain targets, derived from sectoral strategies or national commitments, not from an analytically grounded picture of what the energy system should look like and what investments would make it work. Country platforms are generally a portfolio of investments assembled from existing project pipelines, rather than derived from a system-level analysis of what an optimised, decarbonised energy system would require.
Second, recognise regions as a key planning unit. Modern integrated energy systems are inherently regional. Renewable endowments are unevenly distributed; balancing variable supply across borders lowers aggregate cost, reduces redundant backup capacity, and unlocks economies of scale no individual nation can achieve. Many energy investments in Southeast Asia, East Africa, Southern Africa and Central Asia may only be financeable in a regional context. Assessing domestic infrastructure without regional optimisation perpetuates the perception that decarbonisation is more expensive than it is.
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Third, finance the planning capacity. A coordinated commitment by multilateral development banks, bilateral donors, and philanthropic partners to help every region and its constituent countries develop and maintain their own modelling capability, with open-source tools and regional analytical hubs, would close the most consequential gap in the current architecture. The cost is small relative to current spending on country platforms, failed project preparation, and misallocated infrastructure investment.
This includes supporting regional institutions such as the ASEAN Centre for Energy, the African Energy Commission, regional power pools, and the Latin American and Caribbean Energy Organization to determine what optimised regional systems require. Country-by-country pledging, repeated at every COP, will not deliver what meaningfully integrated systems can.
The 2026 energy crisis made the cost of unplanned, fossil-dependent systems newly visible. That window of clarity will close. The international community should seize the moment to build the planning foundation that has been missing for thirty years, rather than commissioning another round of NDCs or pledges, striving for outcomes neither was designed to deliver.
The post Every country needs a model to help optimise its energy transition appeared first on Climate Home News.
Every country needs a model to help optimise its energy transition
The world is currently experiencing what is expected to become the strongest El Niño on record – dubbed a “super El Niño” by many.
El Niño is the warm phase of a recurring climate pattern in the tropical Pacific that releases heat from the ocean into the atmosphere.
This temporarily raises global temperatures and reshapes rainfall and extreme weather around the world – impacting the lives of billions of people.
The current El Niño event began in June and is expected to last into 2027.
El Niño is part of a wider climate pattern called the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) cycle.
The ENSO cycle also has a cool phase, known as La Niña, as well as a “neutral” phase. El Niño and La Niña events typically last between nine and 12 months, but can go on longer.
Below, Carbon Brief explains how the ENSO cycle works, its impacts on extreme weather and global temperatures and why this El Niño event is projected to be the most intense since records began.
The post Explainer: How the ‘super El Niño’ will reshape the world’s weather appeared first on Carbon Brief.
https://interactive.carbonbrief.org/el-nino-explainer/index.html
The second-largest reservoir in the US reached a record-low water height on Saturday – just days after the country’s largest reservoir broke its own record.
Both Lake Mead and Lake Powell are located on the Colorado River.
They provide water for populations across seven US states in the south-western US, with around 40 million people getting some or all of their municipal water from the Colorado River.
The river also provides water for around 5.5m acres (22,258 square kilometres) of farmland across Colorado, Arizona, California and the other states in the river basin.
Experts tell Carbon Brief that climate change, population growth and over-consumption are all contributing to the current record-low levels of the reservoirs.
Record lows
At full capacity, Lakes Mead and Powell can hold a combined 68 cubic kilometres of water – enough to supply all household consumption in the contiguous US for nearly 1.5 years. However, the water level in both reservoirs has been declining for decades.
The chart below shows the water level of Lake Mead, in metres above mean sea level. The reservoir, which began to fill in 1935 following the construction of the Hoover Dam, has a “full pool” maximum capacity of 347.60 metres. The water level in Lake Mead reached a record low of 317.11 metres on 7 August.
The following chart shows the water level of Lake Powell, in metres above mean sea level. Lake Powell’s full-pool level is 1,127.76 metres.
While the reservoir reached its maximum capacity several times in the 1980s, it has not done so since. On 15 August, the water level in Lake Powell was recorded at a new record-low of 1,072.87 metres.
Both reservoirs have continued to decline in the days since breaking their respective records. The downward trend will largely continue in both lakes until next spring, when the snowpack in the mountains of the Upper Colorado River Basin begins to melt, says Dr Jack Schmidt, a senior research scientist at Utah State University’s Center for Colorado River Studies. He tells Carbon Brief:
“The big dilemma of the moment is that we’re only in the middle of August, and we have no assurance of what the coming winter will be. The only thing we can be sure of is that we will be depleting overall total basin reservoir storage from now until, roughly, early April.”
Compounding factors
The record lows across the two reservoirs are the result of several compounding factors, experts tell Carbon Brief.
Since the turn of the 20th century, the amount of water flowing along the Upper Colorado River has declined by about 20%. Research suggests that half of this decline can be attributed to human-induced climate change.
Most of the river’s streamflow comes from the snowpack of the Upper Colorado River Basin, which stretches across five western US states but is primarily located in Colorado and Utah.
This region has been gripped by a historic “megadrought” for more than a quarter of a century. Nearly half of the megadrought’s intensity over 2000-18 is attributable to climate change, according to a 2020 study.
At the same time, the increasing population in the US south-west has put added pressure on the Colorado River’s water supply. The number of people obtaining some or all of their water from the Colorado system has grown by 15 million (around 60%) since 1992.
Schmidt tells Carbon Brief:
“There’s an ultimate cause of the present water crisis, and there’s a proximate cause. The ultimate cause is a warming climate, a warming planet and a pretty clear correlation between warming conditions and decreased runoff in the Colorado River Basin.
“The proximate cause is that in this messy democratic republic of ours, big policy decisions that match the variability of the climate occur painfully slowly – with intense political negotiations – and only incrementally.”
On 31 July, the US Bureau of Reclamation, which manages water resources in the western US, released an environmental impact statement on its proposed post-2026 strategy for managing Lakes Powell and Mead. The strategy itself has not been released yet.
Schmidt notes that the statement does appear to give the Bureau flexibility to “respond to crisis” by reducing the delivery of water to several states. However, he adds:
“They acknowledge it won’t work if we just stay critically dry, and of course every climate model for the 21st century, especially with a continually warming planet, says that that’s exactly what’s going to happen.”
The post Analysis: The two largest reservoirs in the US have hit record-low levels appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Analysis: The two largest reservoirs in the US have hit record-low levels
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