What’s stopping India from achieving its biogas ambitions?

Recent developments are driving renewed optimism about the biogas industry. But the real challenge lies in addressing policy missteps and operational issues.

India’s pursuit for cleaner energy has a perplexing absentee: biogas.

Generating natural gas from organic waste should be an obvious choice for a country that spends over one-third of its import bill on buying fuel from overseas and has mounds of untreated waste lying in landfills. And yet, locally produced biogas is barely seen in India’s energy mix.

That’s not to say that there haven’t been efforts. In 2018, the government launched a scheme to incentivize setting up of compressed biogas plants by offering assured offtake by state-run oil firms. The target was to produce 15 million metric tonnes of …

Author

Azman Usmani

Azman writes on climate change, ESG, and how a warming world impacts businesses and people alike. Prior to The Morning Context, he led climate coverage at BloombergQuint, where he started his career as a desk writer.

Writer

azman@mailtmc.com

Mumbai