The future is black
STAB a finger at the middle of a map of India and you will hit Nagpur. Some 20 miles (32 kilometres) north-west of the city is a sloping tunnel bored into the rock. Ride two miles down into the gloom, hanging from a wire, and after a torch-lit hike past underground streams and conveyor belts you arrive at a black wall. Sweating men are rigging it with tubes of explosives and wire detonators. Soon they will blast it apart, and down should tumble tonnes of India's most important commodity: coal.
In coal India has something as abundant as people. As more Indians enjoy the trappings of middle-class life and the country industrialises, demand for coal-fired electricity will continue to rise smartly, roughly in line with economic growth. India may not have much oil or gas to call its own but it has the world's fifth-largest coal reserves. And it has successfully raised a mountain of the other raw material needed to turn carbon into sparks: capital. Some $130 billion has been ploughed into the power industry in the past five years. Of that, $60 billion or so has come from the private sector—probably the largest-ever private-sector investment India...