There’s a point in every industry where what you’ve been saying for years stops being a prediction and starts being a headline. I’ve been in the CBG space long enough to know that feeling well. And I think we’re finally there.
India imported approximately 27 million tonnes of Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG), natural gas chilled to a liquid so it can be transported by sea, in FY2024-25. Somewhere between 40 and 45 percent of that came from Qatar and other West Asian suppliers. When that region came under pressure, India’s vulnerability stopped being an energy policy footnote and became front-page news.
None of this should surprise anyone who’s been paying attention. The question was always when, not if.
I’ll be honest: I’ve heard optimistic government statements about CBG before and learned not to get too excited too quickly. But what Petroleum Secretary Neeraj Mittal said at a recent conference organized by PNGRB (Petroleum and Natural Gas Regulatory Board) and Indraprastha Gas Limited is different in one important respect.
The directive, reportedly from the Prime Minister’s office, isn’t just to support CBG. It’s to unify the entire policy support structure across five different ministries and departments under a single, coordinated framework.
That last part is what the sector has actually needed for years. The structural problem with CBG policy in India has never been a shortage of schemes. It’s been that the schemes had different subsidy logic, different eligible end-uses, different paperwork, and different nodal agencies. If you’ve tried to build a CBG plant in this country, you know exactly what it feels like to be bounced between three government bodies, each pointing to the other. A developer who can’t plan with policy certainty doesn’t build. That’s the capital sitting on the sidelines.
A unified program changes that calculation. It signals that the government is treating CBG the way it eventually treated ethanol blending, not as a renewable energy experiment but as a national strategic imperative.
India’s ethanol blending programme is worth studying. It wasn’t a smooth ride, years of pricing corrections, infrastructure buildout, and policy iteration before it reached real scale. But when the government finally committed in earnest, it committed seriously. E20 petrol blended with 20% ethanol is being rolled out this year, and it has demonstrably reduced import dependence in a way that sceptics said wouldn’t happen.
The CBG roadmap is now being constructed with similar conviction. From April 1, 2025, the CBO Compressed Biogas Blending Obligation is live. One percent of biogas must now be blended into PNG (Piped Natural Gas, the gas supplied through household and commercial pipelines) across the country. That number is scheduled to rise to 5% by FY2028-29.
Five percent sounds modest until you run the numbers. The Indian Biogas Association estimates that 5% blending alone can cut LNG imports by $1.17 billion annually. The IEEFA – Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis projects that reaching 20% substitution by 2030 could save India up to $29 billion in total LNG import costs between FY2025 and FY2030.
Here’s what makes those numbers genuinely exciting rather than just impressive: We’re not waiting on technology that doesn’t exist yet. The feedstock agricultural waste, municipal solid waste, press mud from sugar mills, food processing residue, and crops like Napier grass are already there across the country in enormous quantities. The technology to convert it is proven and deployable today. The gap is in deployment speed, not invention.
For anyone who hasn’t spent time in this industry, a quick grounding before we go further.
Raw biogas is produced when organic material breaks down in an anaerobic digester, a sealed tank where bacteria decompose organic matter without oxygen. What comes out is roughly 55-65% methane (the energy-bearing component), with the rest being CO₂, moisture, and trace gases like hydrogen sulfide.
To turn that into a usable fuel, you need to upgrade it: strip out the CO₂, dry the gas, and clean out the impurities until methane content reaches 90% or higher. At that point, it’s chemically identical to natural gas. Compress it, and it becomes CBG Compressed Biogas.
At AtmosPower, we use VPSA Vacuum Pressure Swing Adsorption for this upgrade step. Biogas passes through beds of molecular sieve material, a porous solid that acts as a selective filter, trapping CO₂ while letting methane pass through cleanly. It’s a process we’ve refined across plants ranging from 20 to 7,000 Nm³/hr (cubic meters per hour, the standard measure of gas flow volume), and we’ve now commissioned over 150 plants across India. The technology is patented in both India and Europe.
What makes CBG particularly compelling isn’t just that it’s clean; it’s that it’s a drop-in replacement. Any CNG vehicle runs on it. It can be injected directly into existing gas pipelines. No new infrastructure. No new vehicle technology. It fits right into what already exists.
One feedstock that deserves more attention in this conversation is Napier grass, also known as elephant grass, a high-yield energy crop that grows aggressively across tropical climates. It matures fast, can be harvested multiple times a year, and produces strong biogas yields. For regions where agricultural waste isn’t consistently available, or where feedstock reliability is a concern, Napier grass-based CBG plants offer a compelling alternative.
AtmosPower is currently executing multiple CBG plant projects in Gujarat and Maharashtra, full turnkey EPC (Engineering, Procurement & Construction) projects using Napier grass as the primary feedstock. These aren’t pilot projects or feasibility studies. They’re commercial-scale compressed biogas plants, built ground-up, with our VPSA upgradation technology at the core.
The feedstock economics are well-established at this point. A standard 3 TPD (Tonnes Per Day) CBG plant running on Napier grass requires approximately 75 tonnes of Napier grass and 10 tonnes of cattle manure per day as co-feedstock input, producing compressed biogas with a methane purity of more than 96% by volume. That’s pipeline-quality gas, consistently. The cattle manure co-digestion isn’t just an add-on; it improves digester stability and gas yield and is often readily available near the same farms growing the grass.
The interest from developers and landowners in both states has been real and growing. Gujarat and Maharashtra have the land, the climate, and increasingly the policy incentive to make Napier grass-based CBG viable at scale. What they’ve needed is a technology partner who can execute the full project from civil construction and digester design to gas upgradation and commissioning. That’s what we do.
Here’s the structural number that should concern everyone: India currently meets only about 55% of its natural gas requirement through domestic production. The rest is imported. And most of the domestic gas is already committed to city gas distribution networks, piped cooking gas, and CNG for vehicles, which means industries like fertilizers, steel, and power generation are heavily exposed to imported LNG prices and geopolitical supply risk.
CBG addresses this at the root, because every CBG plant is inherently local. It’s built near its feedstock source, near a farm, a food processing facility, or a waste site. The gas is produced where it’s needed. No shipping lanes. No import terminals. No exposure to what’s happening in the Strait of Hormuz.
India’s biogas market is valued at close to $1.77 billion in 2025 and projected to reach $3.49 billion by 2032. The trajectory is real, but it depends on the right conditions being in place.
The gap between policy intent and ground reality in this sector is real, and it shouldn’t be glossed over.
Offtake certainty remains the single biggest constraint on private investment. Developers can build plants. Lenders can finance them. But without a guaranteed buyer for the gas on the other side, the project economics fall apart, and no amount of government encouragement changes that. Take-or-pay arrangements where buyers contractually commit to purchasing a minimum volume regardless of actual usage would unlock private capital at a scale that subsidies alone cannot reach.
Feedstock mapping is another genuine gap. A proper national database of biomass and energy crop availability, which states have what and in what quantities, would let developers identify the right locations and give lenders the confidence to fund them. Right now, this work is done at the developer level, and it’s expensive and inconsistent.
Grid injection rules need clarity. For CBG to fully replace LNG in industrial and commercial applications, the technical and commercial framework for injecting biomethane (pipeline-grade upgraded biogas) into the existing gas grid must be clearly defined and workable. Progress has been made, but it isn’t fully there yet.
Single-window clearances may sound like a bureaucratic detail, but in practice, the time lost between investment decisions and project commissioning is real money. Streamlining approvals, which the move toward a unified policy framework should eventually enable, would have a measurable impact on project economics.
We’ve spent years at AtmosPower making the case for CBG not just as a clean energy option but as something economically sound, technically proven, and strategically essential to India’s energy mix. The projects we’ve built have processed everything from paddy straw and press mud to food waste, cattle dung, and Napier grass. Backed by an efficient biogas purification system, the gas quality coming out of well-operated CBG plants is consistently comparable to what’s piped in from an import terminal.
That’s not a promise. It’s a track record.
The current LNG supply disruptions making front-page news, a government committing to unify its biogas policy, a blending mandate already in force, and developers across Gujarat and Maharashtra recognizing what Napier grass-based CBG plants can do make for the most favourable environment this sector has seen. India has the feedstock. It has the technology. It has the policy intent.
What it needs now is execution at scale. That’s exactly what we’ve been doing since 2010.
AtmosPower Pvt. Ltd. is a turnkey EPC provider for CBG plants and compressed biogas plants, with over 150 installations commissioned across India. Our proprietary VPSA technology is patented in India and Europe. We are currently executing CBG EPC projects using Napier grass feedstock in Gujarat and Maharashtra.
Inquire about Napier grass CBG plant projects in your region. Get in touch with us for more details on: +91-6358768268 or brsingh@atmospower.net
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