Set-up of CBG plants across India

The Indian Government’s Sustainable Alternative Towards Affordable Transportation (SATAT) initiative represents a large-scale structural push within the Oil & Gas sector to transition toward compressed biogas (CBG) as a viable transport fuel, with a target of setting up ~5,000 plants at an estimated investment of INR 2 lakh crore. Driven by the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas, the scheme has seen active participation from major public sector oil marketing companies such as Indian Oil Corporation, Bharat Petroleum Corporation Limited, and Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Limited, which are offering long-term offtake agreements to developers to ensure demand visibility.
At the same time, gas infrastructure players like GAIL are working toward integrating CBG into existing gas distribution networks, while private sector participants such as Adani Total Gas and Reliance Industries are beginning to explore investments and partnerships in the bioenergy value chain.
On the ground, key developments include the issuance of hundreds of Letters of Intent (LoIs) to entrepreneurs, early-stage commissioning of plants utilizing agricultural residue, municipal solid waste, and other biomass sources, and policy support from states like Maharashtra, Punjab, and Karnataka to enable land access and feedstock aggregation.
However, execution remains uneven due to logistical challenges in biomass collection, financing constraints for smaller developers, and ongoing pricing uncertainties between CBG and conventional fuels.
Despite these bottlenecks, the initiative is gradually shaping a decentralized gas production ecosystem that links agriculture, waste management, and energy distribution, positioning CBG as both a clean fuel alternative and a strategic lever to reduce LNG imports, monetize waste streams, and enable incremental decarbonization of India’s transport fuel mix without requiring significant changes to existing CNG infrastructure.