India’s coal ministry, at the urging of state miner Coal India Ltd., is asking the government to levy an environmental tax on a competing fuel in effort to maintain coal’s cost-competitiveness, according to people with knowledge of the matter.
Petcoke, an oil-refining byproduct and a coal substitute, is more polluting than coal and should be subject to the same federal taxes, the coal ministry said in a letter to the finance ministry, according to officials with knowledge of the matter, requesting not to be identified because the information isn’t public. India doubled the clean-environment tax on coal this year to 400 rupees ($6) a ton, as part of its global climate commitments.
