India to mix biogas with natural gas - for automotive fuels and for electricity

After implementing its ambitious liquid biofuel policies, India's federal government is now thinking of mixing biogas with natural gas to increase the share of alternative fuels in the total energy portfolio of the rapidly growing country. The strategy is part of India's ambitious national biogas programme, which in turn falls under the country's general bioenergy framework. The biogas-NG mix will both be used as an automotive fuel as well as for the generation of electricity.

The Indian Ministry of Non-Conventional Energy Sources (MNES) announced that it is going to stimulate the private sector engaged in the production of biogas to consider feeding biogas into the natural gas pipelines for urban gas projects that are being planned in different cities of the country. Mixing biogas with natural gas will follow two separate tracks: one aimed at fuelling cars with Compressed Biogas (CBG) (consisting of methane derived from both natural gas and biogas, in a ratio of 60 to 40 maximum), the other aimed at generating electricity.

"Biogas can be purified and compressed to meet the requirements of the city gas projects and thus throw a good opportunity for development and growth of biogas plants in the country," MNES secretary Shri V. Subramanian said. Subramanian was speaking at the MNES-sponsored national workshop on ‘A Policy Framework for the Biogas Programme for the Next 10 Years’ [*.pdf] at the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi.

The Indian Supreme Court has meanwhile given its mandate on the first track: supplying biogas as an automotive fuel to urban centres other than 'metropolitan cities' (which have a special status) is now allowed.

Looking at Europe and Pakistan
India is looking at examples in Europe and in Pakistan, where biogas and CNG have established themselves as viable automotive fuels and where compressed biogas vehicles (bi- or tri-fuel) have arrived on the market. Scandinavia and Central Europe are experiencing a real biogas boom with governments, consumers, auto-manufacturers and fuel distributors investing collectively in biomethane production, distribution and incentives aimed at stimulating consumption. Even though it can be produced from organic waste streams coming from agriculture, municipalities, households and industry, many European countries are beginning to use dedicated energy crops for the production of the gas, such as specially developed hybrid maize varieties and exotic grass species. New technologies for purifying the green gas before mixing it into the natural gas network are also being developed (earlier post).

Pakistan on the other hand is proving that radically switching from a gasoline/diesel to a CNG-infrastructure is feasible. In a crash program that lasted less than two years, the country built a CNG-distribution infrastructure and got 1 million CNG-vehicles on the road (earlier post). These two developments and strategies are now going to be combined in India.

The most environmentally friendly of all fuels
The main advantage of Compressed Biogas (CBG) is that, of more than 70 possible (bio)fuel pathways, it releases the smallest amount of CO2 when the entire well-to-wheel trajectory of the fuel is analysed. Depending on the feedstock, bioconversion process and propulsion technology being used, biogas can even be carbon-negative (earlier post):
biomass :: bioenergy :: biofuels :: energy :: sustainability :: waste :: biogas :: natural gas :: India ::

Besides the potential of the biogas/natural gas mix as an automotive fuel, India will also rely on it to generate electricity, both in metropolitan areas as well as in smaller urban centres. "These smaller cities can be focused on for effecting a synergy between biogas plants and the city gas distribution network coming up in those areas," Subramanian said. At the workshop, Subramanian also asked the participants to deliberate upon the various challenges that the programme to popularise biogas plants in the country would face.

He also underlined that the renewable energy sector is not only supplying electricity produced from renewable and non-conventional sources but also helping in sustaining the environment by decreasing the use of firewood and fossil fuels. He said 19 billion Kwh of electricity generated from renewable energy sources was supplied last year. "The total installed capacity of power from renewable energy sources has crossed 8,500 MW," he said. The Workshop is being attended by the heads of rural development departments and state nodal agencies of various states implementing national biogas programme. The heads of Regional Biogas Training Centres, senior scientists of ICAR Laboratories, among others, are also participating.