India’s planned launch of a national carbon capture, utilisation and storage (CCUS) initiative marks a pivotal shift in how the country is seeking to reconcile two seemingly conflicting priorities: meeting surging energy demand to power its industrial expansion and urbanisation, while advancing toward its climate commitments.

The government is preparing to introduce generous incentives, covering between 50% and 100% of the cost of select projects, to catalyse the deployment of CCUS technologies. The aim is to make it economically viable for industries to capture carbon at the point of emission, especially from coal-fired power plants and heavy industrial facilities, and either store it underground or use it as feedstock in industrial processes.

India’s Epsilon Advanced Materials is moving quickly to exploit a sudden opening in the U.S. battery supply chain after Washington slapped a 93.5% anti-dumping duty on Chinese graphite anode materials. With Chinese inputs now far less economical, Japanese and South Korean battery makers operating in the U.S. have shifted from “wait and see” to active procurement, and Epsilon says it expects to lock in contracts within the next two to three months.

Those offtakes would underpin a $650 million plant in North Carolina, sized for 30,000 tonnes a year of anode material and slated to start up by mid-2027. It’s a meaningful first step but still small versus an estimated 500,000 tonnes the U.S. market needs annually, demand that until now was met largely with material refined in China, which controls over 90% of global graphite processing.

China released a policy document on Sunday, reiterating its ambitions to develop advanced industries and improve the business environment. This follows a meeting of the Communist Party’s Central Committee, led by President Xi Jinping, from July 15-18. The 60-point document, however, offered no indication of imminent…