What’s stopping India from achieving its biogas ambitions?

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Editor's note: 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 CBG from 5,000 new plants by the end of this year. As of March, only 46 plants had been commissioned, and the actual production was even lower than expected.