netiBIO Wins Biomass Award as CBG Plants Chase Higher Yield

netiBIO, the bioenergy arm of Bengaluru engineering firm STEER World, picked up a breakthrough-technology award on June 2 for a biomass pre-treatment system it says can raise biogas output by up to 2.1 times. The prize, handed out at the 5th BBB International Expo and Summit at IICC Yashobhoomi in New Delhi, lands at an awkward moment for India’s compressed biogas (CBG, methane cleaned up to vehicle-fuel grade from farm waste and organic residue) industry.

The award itself is small news. What sits under it is the reason a programme that once promised thousands of plants has produced only about 132 running ones: getting bulky farm residue to break down fast enough that the gas it yields pays back the plant processing it.

netiBIO’s 2.1X Yield Pitch Takes the Breakthrough Award

The full citation runs long, recognising a technology to pre-condition biomass and agri residue for value creation in bioenergy and biofuels. Rajaraman DC, chief business officer of STEER World’s bioenergy division, collected it at the summit. Strip away the ceremony language and the claim is narrow and specific.

netiBIO says its conditioning step can lift biogas output by up to 2.1 times, and it qualifies that figure carefully, “under suitable operating conditions,” before the feedstock ever reaches the digester. That caveat does real work. Yields in anaerobic digestion swing hard with feedstock type, moisture and how fast you load the tank, so a headline multiple reads as a ceiling rather than a promise. The direction is what plant operators care about, because a digester that gives up more methane per tonne of straw changes the entire payback maths.

Improving biogas yield from existing biomass and agri residue is one of the most practical ways to strengthen the economics of CBG plants in India.

That is Nitin Gupta, executive director and global chief executive of STEER World, in the company’s statement on the award. His framing is the giveaway. He is not selling a new fuel or a new plant design. He is selling more gas out of the same straw, which tells you where the sector’s pain actually sits.

Why Rice Straw Fights the Digester

India generates enormous volumes of crop residue every harvest, and on paper that looks like free fuel. In a digester it behaves like the opposite. Paddy straw, sugarcane trash and similar agricultural residues are lignocellulosic, meaning their energy is locked inside tough fibres of cellulose, hemicellulose and lignin. The microbes that produce biogas struggle to get at it.

High lignin content slows microbial activity, so a tank fed raw straw produces less gas and produces it more slowly. Many plants watch yields drift down over months as poorly broken-down fibre accumulates. There are physical headaches too: light, dry residue floats, and scum layers form on the surface and choke the process. A techno-economic review of compressed biogas from agricultural residues in India flags this recalcitrance as a core reason real-world output lags lab numbers.

Pre-treatment is the answer the engineering literature keeps returning to. Shred, shear and open up the fibre structure first, and the microbes get a much easier meal. The trouble has been that adding a pre-treatment step costs money and energy, and operators running on thin margins have often skipped it. That is the corner netiBIO is trying to occupy: a conditioning stage cheap enough and productive enough that skipping it stops making sense.

How SATAT Fell Short of 5,000 Plants

To see why a yield claim earns an award at all, you have to look at how far India’s biogas plan has drifted from its own targets.

The Target on Paper

SATAT, short for Sustainable Alternative Towards Affordable Transportation, was rolled out by India’s state oil marketing companies in 2018. The ambition was huge: 5,000 CBG plants and around 15 million tonnes of annual output by 2023-24, with the oil companies committing to buy the gas. You can read the buyback structure in the SATAT programme’s official overview, which still frames the scheme around assured offtake.

Where the Pipeline Stalled

The build-out never came close. Letters of intent piled into the thousands, but commissioned plants stayed in the low hundreds. Three things broke the model:

• Feedstock logistics: aggregating, baling and moving low-density crop residue across long distances is expensive and seasonal.
• Financing: lenders treated a plant whose output yield was uncertain as a risky asset.
• Voluntary demand: with no blending obligation until recently, there was no guaranteed pull at the other end.

Put plainly, the running fleet sits at well under 3% of the original plant target. The cumulative commissioned capacity, reported at 920 tonnes a day, is a fraction of what 5,000 plants were meant to deliver.

Mandatory Blending Changes the Demand Math

The policy backdrop shifted in the operators’ favour over the past year, and that is what makes a yield-boosting tool commercially interesting now rather than two years ago. The biggest change is on the demand side. The Compressed Biogas Blending Obligation, optional until 2024-25, became mandatory from this fiscal year, ramping up on a fixed schedule:

1. FY 2025-26: 1% of total CNG and piped natural gas consumption
2. FY 2026-27: 3%
3. FY 2027-28: 4%

That converts a voluntary market into a captive one. Gas distributors now have to source CBG, which gives a plant something it never reliably had, a buyer. Pricing was sweetened too: in May 2025 the CBG purchase price was revised to 85% of the average CNG retail selling price, up from 80%. The 2026-27 budget also scrapped central excise duty on the biogas portion of blended CNG, ending a double-taxation quirk that had eaten into margins. The regulator’s plan for folding CBG into the national gas grid lays out how that injected gas moves through the pipeline network.

On the supply side, the government’s Biomass Aggregation Machinery scheme put up roughly ₹564 crore (about $66 million) through 2026-27 to subsidise balers and collection equipment, aimed squarely at the residue-logistics problem. Demand is now mandated and feedstock collection is being subsidised. The piece still left exposed is what happens inside the tank, which is exactly where pre-treatment lives.

STEER World’s Crossover From Plastics to Paddy Straw

The company behind the award is not a biogas start-up. STEER World built its name in twin-screw extrusion, the high-shear continuous process that compounds plastics, blends pharmaceutical ingredients and processes food and advanced materials. From its Bengaluru base it sells extrusion platforms worldwide, and the bioenergy push is a deliberate move to point that same fibre-shearing know-how at farm waste.

netiBIO’s flagship hardware is the Alpha series, a modular bio-processor the company says can handle up to 300 tonnes of feedstock a day while opening up biomass structure for digestion. At the IBET 2025 industry event the unit ran Napier grass and paddy straw, two of the toughest residues a CBG plant has to swallow. The logic borrows directly from the academic work on twin-screw extrusion as a mechanical pretreatment for biomethane, which has shown that shearing lignocellulosic feedstock raises methane output.

The bet is a clean one for an engineering firm. The same machines that crack polymer chains can crack plant fibre, and India is about to need a lot of plant fibre cracked. STEER World’s broader push into deep-tech, backed by a recent leadership reshuffle, treats bioenergy as a growth line rather than a side project, and its twin-screw extrusion platform is the technical bridge between the two worlds.

What Higher Yield Buys a Struggling Plant

For an operator, yield is not an abstract metric. It is the ratio that decides whether a plant covers its loan. A digester squeezing more methane out of each tonne of straw spreads its fixed costs across more saleable gas, and at 85% of the CNG price that extra gas drops to the bottom line. A 2.1-times improvement, even discounted heavily for the “suitable conditions” caveat, is the difference between a plant that limps and one that pays.

The catch is durability. Anaerobic digestion stays sensitive to feedstock variability, organic loading and supply continuity, and a pilot result on clean test material is not the same as a year of mixed, muddy, seasonal residue. Conditioning can flatten some of that variability, but it cannot fix a plant that runs out of straw in the dry months.

Market researcher MarkNtel Advisors puts India’s CBG market at $319 million in 2025 and expects it to clear $2.4 billion by 2032. Forecasts like that assume the plants already built start running far closer to capacity than they do today. The blending mandate finally hands those plants a guaranteed buyer; the count now has to climb from roughly 132 toward the 750 plants the government wants running by 2028, and that progress will show up in annual output data long before it shows up on any awards stage.