India’s Energy Resilience Through Internal Alternatives

Limits of Domestic Oil and Gas Expansion

• Andaman and Nicobar Option: Offshore oil and gas exploration near the Andaman and Nicobar Islands is possible but capital-intensive, uncertain and likely to take decades if successful.
• Strategic Shift: India needs commercially viable fossil-fuel alternatives from local resources, along with alternative LNG supply and distribution chains.

Electrification and Non-Fossil Power

• Electricity Expansion: Wider use of electricity is needed in transport, cooking, industrial process heat and production of e-fuels.
• Non-Fossil Targets: India’s energy resilience depends on scaling non-fossil electricity, including renewable and nuclear capacity.
• Storage Requirement: Large-scale non-fossil electricity needs energy storage supported by Internet of Things and artificial intelligence to reduce capital intensity.
• Demand-Side Shift: EV adoption and electric cooking can reduce dependence on imported petroleum fuels.
• Rare Earths Need: Domestic rare earth extraction is important because India has significant deposits and clean-energy technologies depend on such minerals.

Biofuels from Biomass and Waste

• Biomass Base: India has large sustainable biomass and crop-residue resources from grain crops, oilseeds, sugarcane, cotton, horticulture and spoilt produce.
• Net Crop Residue: Out of nearly 950 million metric tonnes annually, about 400 million metric tonnes remain after use as cattle feed and soil-fertility input.
• Forest Biomass: Annual forest biomass yield is around 260 million metric tonnes, mostly used in low-value ways.
• Biofuel Pathways: Biomass can be converted into pellets, briquettes, biochar, pyrolytic oil and syngas.
• Fischer-Tropsch Route: Syngas can be converted into hydrocarbons through the established Fischer-Tropsch process.
• Waste-to-Energy Scope: Agricultural residues, manure, municipal solid and liquid waste, and forestry biomass can support domestic fuel production.

Biogas and Biomethane Potential

• Manure Resource: India’s nearly 300 million cattle and 1 billion poultry generate about 300 million metric tonnes of dry manure annually.
• Biogas Potential: This can produce around 100 billion cubic metres of biogas per year.
• Biomethane Scope: Established technology can convert this into over 55 billion cubic metres of biomethane.
• LNG Import Substitution: India consumes around 70 billion cubic metres of natural gas, including about 35 billion cubic metres of imports; biomethane can in principle replace current LNG imports.
• Distribution Advantage: Biomethane can use natural gas pipelines and small-scale LNG infrastructure.

Natural Gas and Small-Scale LNG

• Gas Diversification: Natural gas sources are more widely distributed globally, making gas less vulnerable to cartelisation than oil.
• Long-Term Contracts: India should negotiate long-term gas contracts with sources less exposed to disruption.
• Pipeline Limitation: India has about 25,000 km of gas pipelines, but extending pipelines for small and dispersed demand is often uneconomic.
• SSLNG Role: Small-scale LNG can support city gas distribution, dispersed industrial use and trucking where pipelines are not viable.

Implementation Challenges

• Logistics Constraint: Biomass and manure are low-value and low-bulk-density resources, making procurement and transport difficult.
• Processing Challenge: Efficient movement of biomass or concentrated intermediates to processing and distribution centres is crucial.
• Entrepreneurship Need: New business models and entrepreneurial innovation are needed to solve logistics and aggregation problems.
• Financing Push: Financial institutions should treat such models like priority sectors.
• Incentive Design: Environmental-service payments, carbon credits and premiums for reducing petroleum-import disruption risk are preferred over conventional subsidies.