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EAI’s BioBiz division offers specialized market understanding and technical feasibility assistance for companies keen on benefitting from the opportunity offered by compressed biogas (also called bioCNG or renewable natural gas).


About the Indian CBG Business Opportunity

Compressed biogas (CBG) is a gaseous fuel similar to natural gas, but derived from biological and sustainable sources such as food waste, animal waste and crop waste.

As the Indian natural gas demand is expected to significantly increase during the next few decades, and with sustainability being a key objective in this growth, the CBG market is expected to grow at attractive rates.

Over the last few years, the Indian government has accorded significant focus on this emerging business opportunity, and has come up with a number of incentives and mandates to facilitate the growth of CBG in the country. With strong offtake interest from the national oil marketing companies such as IOC, the CBG opportunity is finding significant interest from the business and entrepreneur community in India.

Who will benefit from this opportunity?

Entrepreneurs keen on entering an attractive business opportunity that is also environment friendly will find this opportunity productive and valuable.

This opportunity could be of specific interest to the following companies and entrepreneurs:

  • Companies already offering renewable energy solutions or services
  • Companies in the infrastructure & logistics sectors
  • Businesses already operating in the food, travel and hospitality sectors
  • Businesses that are in the agriculture and crops processing sectors
  • Businesses in the plastics and chemicals industries

Why is this Opportunity Attractive?

  • Natural gas will find significant demand from many sectors in India for the coming decades
  • As CBG is renewable and sustainable, it will find high interest among natural gas user firms that are keen to reduce their carbon footprint
  • The Government of India has provided significant incentives as well as strong offtaker support for CBG
  • As this is a B2B opportunity that can have multi year contracts with oil marketing companies and/or business & commercial end users, it presents an attractive long term revenue opportunity for businesses.

What Assistance Can EAI’s BioBiz Provide for CBG?

We can help you with a comprehensive market intelligence on the following aspects of a CBG business:

  • Market Trends
  • Capacity
  • Intelligence on End User Segments
  • Feedstock
  • Choice of Location
  • Key Drivers
  • Key Challenges & Constraints
  • Competition
  • Differentiation
  • Real Life Case Studies
  • Technology
  • Partnership Possibilities
  • Economics

Market Trends

Objective: To provide the big picture on India’s emerging sustainable energy trends and where CBG fits into this picture.

Optimal Capacity

Objective: Determining the optimal capacity for the CBG plant

Most CBG plants under the SATAT scheme are implemented for a 5 TPD of CBG production. 

However, our team will review all the other dimensions such as investments needed,  economic returns, feedstock availability and offtaker potential in order to determine the optimal capacity for the CBG plants.

Intelligence on End User Segments

Objective: Intelligence on end user segments for CBG, their profiles and the commercial aspects of CBG use by these segments.

Following inputs will be provided for the top 3 customer segments which are likely to be:

Note: Inputs will be for CBG, but key inputs will also be provided for the liquid & solid digestate that can be used as fertilizers, and CO2 that gets released from the upgradation process.

For CBG

For the by-products

For the solid & liquid digestate that can be used as fertilizer, and for CO2, the following details will be collected:

Feedstock

Objective: To provide intelligence on the following aspects for feedstock - types, characteristics, supply chain and commercials.

Feedstock comprises one of the most critical variables for a CBG project. We will undertake the following research:

Location

Objective: Arriving at the optimal location for implementing your CBG plant.

Location plays an important role in the success of CBG plants as location is a critical variable for feedstock availability.

If you do not have a preferred location for your plant, we can help you arrive at an optimal location.

Significant amount of brainstorming and analyses will be undertaken to identify the ideal location for the proposed plant. This will depend on:

Key Drivers 

Objective: To provide insights on the key drivers with an emphasis on government policies, mandates & incentives.

Key Challenges & Constraints

Objective: Provide inputs on the key challenges with higher emphasis on challenges for feedstock, from offtakers and with policies

Key challenges for the following contexts will be analyzed:

Competition

Objective: Provide insights on current and future expected competition with an emphasis on shortlisted regions

Competition for CBG plants has grown significantly since the GoI came up with the SATAT scheme a few years back ( https://satat.co.in/satat/ ). While the scheme has proceeded much more slowly than anticipated, there has been high interest from investors to build CBG plants, all across India.

For a new entrant, such high competition could be welcome as it results in reduction of equipment costs, enhanced availability of solution providers & skilled manpower, and also better access to intelligence about CBG plants.

As the offtake potential for CBG is expected to be much higher than what the country produces today, diminished demand might not be a key challenge to a new entrant from competition.

The key challenge for a new entrant from increased competition will be diminished access to feedstock supply, given the nature of feedstock and related supply chains for CBG.

The above will be kept in mind while analysing the competition for CBG plants.

Real Life Case Studies

Objective: Enabling you to understand the real life challenges of operating CBG plants and key learnings from these

CBG is a fairly new sector in India.

The first step depends on anaerobic digestion based biogas generation, a business sector that has existed for many years. What is new is the additional stage where biogas is upgraded to CBG through the removal of CO2. 

The process of separating CO2 from biogas is predominantly an engineering (mechanical engineering) process, and thus we expect this to pose limited technology challenges (though there could be economic challenges).

Anaerobic digestion, on the other hand, is a microbial/biological process, and we have seen many challenges faced by biogas plants in our last 15 years of work in the climate tech sector, especially when businesses tried to scale such digesters from a few hundred kilograms feedstock to a few thousand.

Fortunately, we have some CBG plants already operational in India at a reasonable scale (100 TPD of feedstock), and we would like to do a real life evaluation of how these plants are doing currently. The following will be done: 

Differentiation

Objective: Enable you to get a deeper perspective on differentiation strategies that have the potential to enhance business success

What are the different aspects through which a Bio-CNG producer can differentiate the product? Through a mix of primary interactions with key stakeholders, research on how the competition is planning to differentiate, and also with internal brainstorming, we will arrive at effective avenues for differentiation, on the following dimensions - differentiation through

Partnership Possibilities

Objective: Provide an overview of the potential, relevant and feasible partnerships for critical dimensions of the CBG business, especially for feedstock.

While business partnerships can add value once a business is established, we are not sure if technology partnerships should be evaluated for a CBG business as it is driven mostly through the choice of the right technology vendor, rather than a partner.

As a result, technology partnerships will not be a priority section for the assignment.

However, we will provide perspectives, along with real life examples from other businesses in this domain, on what types of business partnerships could strengthen the business case for your business profile and aspirations. Examples could be:

Technology

Objective: Provide intelligence on the technologies available for two key components of the CBG business - anaerobic digester and CO2 separation - and enable you to choose the optimal technology solution.

Costs & Economics

Objective: Provide revenue, returns and cash flow estimates under different scenarios, taking into account all feasible revenue streams. 

A comprehensive financial model with the following incorporated: 

About EAI

EAI is India’s leading business catalyst for climate action – operating in clean energy, environment and sustainability sectors.

Through our offerings in strategic & market intelligence, partnership facilitation and business promotion for clean energy and environment sectors, we contribute to India’s sustainable growth and development.

Our thought leadership in this critical sector has been obtained through our decade plus efforts offering specialized consultancy, critical business intelligence, and in-depth research. Our reports and solutions are highly sought after by policy makers, large and small industries, and growth seeking renewable energy companies.

Highlights of work

13 yearsOne of the few Indian firms with over a decade of expertise in climate tech consulting and market intelligence

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