India’s cows offer biogas option to Mideast energy crunch
Across much of India, an energy crunch caused by the Iran war has prompted long queues for cooking gas cyclinders. That’s not a problem for Gauri Devi.
On a stove with blue flames, she flips a chapati flatbread, burning biogas produced from cow dung—an alternative fuel helping ease pressure on supplies.
“It cooks everything,” the 25-year-old said in her courtyard kitchen in Nekpur, a village in Uttar Pradesh, about 90 kilometers (55 miles) from New Delhi. “If the pressure goes down, we let it rest for half an hour and it works again.”
India consumes more than 30 million tons of liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) annually, importing over half its needs.
The government insists there is no shortage of cooking gas, but supply delays, panic buying, and black marketeers have created long queues for cylinders.
However, since the 1980s India has also promoted biogas as a low-cost rural energy source, subsidizing more than 5 million “digester” units that convert farm waste into methane for cooking, and nitrogen-rich slurry for fertilizer.
‘Black gold’
For Gauri, it requires mixing a couple of buckets of dung with water, then pouring the mixture into a car-sized underground tank topped with a storage balloon.
It provides a piped methane supply so regular that she only uses an LPG cylinder for emergencies or large gatherings.
The biogas works for everything—“vegetables, tea, lentils,” she said.
The residual slurry is later spread on fields as fertilizer. It has better nitrogen availability for plants compared with raw dung, farmers say.
“The real benefit is not just the gas—that is like a bonus,” local farmer leader Pritam Singh said. “The slurry is ‘black gold.’”
More than 45 percent of India’s 1.4 billion people rely on farming, and the country has one of the largest cattle populations.
India—the world’s most populous nation and third-largest fossil fuel polluter—has pushed large-scale biogas production to achieve a goal of carbon neutrality by 2070.
The government last year required that biogas account for at least 1 percent of liquid gas fueling both vehicles and for domestic use—rising to 5 percent by 2028.
But small-scale rural producers are also being rolled out—units cost around 25,000-30,000 rupees ($265-$318), often heavily subsidized by the government.
