Crop Residues Based Pellets Market Opportunities in India

Ever increasing use of fossil fuels such as coal and oil, contributing significantly to global warming and a great deal of harm to the environment. It is of utmost necessity to develop green sources of energy not only to generate power but most importantly to reduce the impact of energy production on the environment. In addition to the climate challenges, we are now facing challenges related to high energy prices and the high risk of supply shortages. Energy and, in particular, the clean energy is an important topic that needs special attention by the scientific community World-wide and, more so, in the context of the developing countries. Renewable energy should be looked as the most important instrument for the socioeconomic development, eradication of poverty and unemployment and an instrument of rural development.

Amongst potential renewable energy sources, biomass can play an important role in achieving a net-zero carbon emissions and can be used to produce electricity, transportation fuels, or chemicals. Development of small to medium size technologies for power production in order to allow the exploitation of low value feedstocks, such as biomass residues from forest management, agro-industrial, agricultural sectors and wood industries, are of importance, especially in the context of the developing country, like India.

It is in the above context that to address many challenges, such like biomass collection, processing, storage and its transportation to the point of ultimate utilization an important idea to develop decentralized model involving Farmer Producer Organizations (FPOs), farmers cooperatives, etc. in production of crop residue pellets or terrified pellets at village level, has been discussed in the present paper.