India’s 2018 National Policy on Biofuels sets ambitious biofuel targets of 20% ethanol blending and 5% biodiesel blending, both by 2030, and aims to source these biofuels only from sustainable feedstocks that do not threaten food security. This is admirable and prudent from an environmental perspective, but also suggests that meeting the targets will require India to establish a large, domestic advanced biofuels industry in a decade. This working paper estimates the potential advanced biofuel production in India from a feedstock-availability and infrastructure-deployment perspective. The authors draw upon activity data for relevant economic sectors to estimate both the total feedstock potential eligible for India’s biofuel policy and the share of that feedstock that is sustainably available. Moreover, the paper evaluates the technological potential for converting each feedstock, in order to estimate the quantity of liquid biofuels that could be produced by 2030.
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