Our findings show that coal-CCS not only suffers from typical new technology development related challenges—such as a lack of technical potential assessments and necessary support infrastructure, and high costs—but also from severe resource constraints (especially water) in an era of global warming and the competition from outperforming renewable power sources. Thus, our study adds a considerable level of techno-economic and environmental nexus specificity to the current debate about coal-based large-scale CCS and the low carbon energy transition in emerging and developing economies in the Global South, taking India as a case study.