From Global Technology to Local Transformation: How Biomass Is Quietly Becoming India’s Next Strategic Feedstock

A few days back, Honeywell — a large American industrial technology company — licensed out its newly-developed ethanol-to-jetfuel (ETJ) technology to an Indian company, as per a news report by the BusinessLine. On the surface, this appears to be a routine technology-licensing deal. In reality, it signals something far more consequential: Honeywell is not a startup experimenting at the margins, but a century-old industrial corporation with deep expertise in process engineering tools, catalysts, thermal systems, aircraft components, and large-scale deployment. Its foray into Sustainable Aviation Fuel (the formal name for biojetfuel) production technology suggests that biomass-based fuels are moving out of pilot territory and into commercial feasibility. 

However, at the same time, this development also reveals that despite abundant biomass availability in India, Indian companies do not yet possess the complex technologies needed to transform biomass into advanced liquid fuels at industrial scale; and global industrial technology majors are now stepping in to fill that gap. Ironically, as per the news report, the technology was developed at the Honeywell's global capability centre in Gurugram, Haryana! Nevertheless, I argue, this development is extremely important for India.


Biomass: Nature’s Original Hydrocarbon Stock

Zooming out, the larger story is not aviation fuel alone. Biomass deserves renewed attention as a strategic feedstock precisely because coal and petroleum themselves are nothing but ancient biomass, transformed over millions of years by heat, pressure, and geology. Modern technology is essentially attempting to compress that geological process—from millennia to minutes—using chemistry, catalysis, heat, and control systems.

Biomass can be converted into a wide range of fuels and intermediates: SAF, ethanol, renewable diesel, bio-naphtha, synthetic gas, and even hydrogen. Unlike fossil fuels, it is renewable, geographically distributed, and already embedded in agricultural, urban, and household systems—especially in a country like India.

However, producing fuels from biomass is inherently complex. Biomass is chemically heterogeneous: it contains cellulose, hemicellulose, lignin, moisture, ash, and contaminants. Unlike crude oil—which is energy-dense, uniform, and liquid—biomass is bulky, variable, and often wet. Converting it into drop-in fuels requires multi-stage processes: feedstock preparation, gasification or fermentation, upgrading through catalysts, and precise thermal and process control. Each stage must operate reliably, continuously, and economically at scale.

This is where companies like Honeywell matter. Success lies not in a single scientific breakthrough, but in systems integration: catalysts that tolerate impurities, reactors that run continuously, and control systems that ensure yield, safety, and uptime. Scaling biomass conversion is less about discovery science and more about industrial engineering discipline—a domain where global process companies hold a decisive advantage.


Why India Is Uniquely Positioned—If It Acts

If such technologies are mastered and scaled domestically, the implications for India could be transformative. Few countries combine India’s biomass abundance with its energy demand, employment needs, and urbanisation pressures.

India generates enormous quantities of biowaste—crop residue, animal waste, municipal organic waste, food waste, sewage sludge, and forestry by-products. Today, much of this is burned, dumped, or left to decay, creating pollution rather than value. Advanced biomass-to-fuel technologies offer a pathway to convert this systemic inefficiency into an economic asset.

This transformation, however, does not happen automatically. It requires institutional frameworks—urban and rural—that can aggregate feedstock, integrate technology, generate employment, and create stable revenue streams.


Urban India: From Waste Dumping to Resource Development 

Indian cities sit at the intersection of consumption, congestion, and waste generation. Municipal solid waste is typically framed as a governance burden. Yet the organic fraction of urban waste is, in fact, a continuously replenished biomass stream—if captured and processed correctly.

An urban biomass framework can be visualised as a layered municipal ecosystem:

1. Source segregation and collection: The foundation lies in segregation of organic/inorganic waste at source (ie, by waste producers themselves), supported by door-to-door collection, ward-level monitoring, and basic digital tracking. Without clean organic streams, all downstream conversion-economics collapse.

2. Collation hubs and logistics: Ward- or zone-level hubs aggregate segregated organic waste, handle shredding and preprocessing, and consolidate volumes. These hubs convert fragmented neighbourhood waste into industrially usable feedstock while feeding real-time data into municipal planning systems.

3. Processing and conversion nodes: At city or peri-urban scale, biomethanation, anaerobic digestion, and emerging biomass-to-fuel plants convert organic waste into compressed biogas (CBG), electricity, compost, and—eventually—advanced fuels. These facilities are capital-intensive but operationally stable once feedstock flows are assured.

4. Market and offtake linkages: CBG can be sold to oil marketing companies, industrial users, or public transport fleets. Compost feeds urban landscaping and peri-urban agriculture. Predictable offtake contracts are what turn waste processing from a civic service into an economic activity.

5. Employment and inclusion: Urban biomass systems are labour-absorbing across collection, logistics, plant operations, and maintenance. Formalising these roles—often filled today by informal workers—creates dignified, semi-skilled employment and space for MSMEs and self-help groups.


In effect, under this framework, city outskirts could stop being waste dump-yards and become distributed resource-generation platforms.


Rural India: Panchayats as Biomass and Energy Nodes

If cities generate concentrated organic waste, rural India produces vast diffuse biomass streams—crop residue, animal waste, and household organic waste. These are currently under-utilised or actively harmful, as seen in stubble burning.

Replacing municipalities with panchayats—especially zila panchayats—reveals a parallel rural framework:

Feedstock aggregation through panchayat-coordinated collection of crop residue and organic waste, giving farmers alternatives to burning and dumping.

Pre-processing hubs at block or district level for drying, shredding, and densification, creating rural industrial activity without heavy capital intensity.

Conversion partnerships where private firms deploy advanced biomass-to-fuel technologies—licensed or indigenous—at district scale.

Local value capture via lease fees, revenue shares, or energy credits flowing to panchayats, while farmers earn supplemental income and rural youth find non-migratory employment.

Energy security through locally produced fuels that reduce dependence on imported hydrocarbons and stabilise rural energy access.


This need not be a subsidy-driven welfare model. It could be an industrial ecosystem anchored in waste engineering, logistics, and economics.


India's Strategic Choice Ahead

Honeywell’s SAF licensing deal should be read as both opportunity and warning. The opportunity lies in leapfrogging—from waste management to advanced fuels—by integrating global process expertise with India’s biomass advantage. The warning is that if Indian engineering companies remain merely technology licensees rather than technology developers, India will remain a technologically vulnerable nation.

Biomass will not replace fossil fuels overnight. But as a distributed, renewable, employment-generating feedstock, it occupies a strategic middle ground between climate ambition and economic realism. Countries that master this transition will quietly reshape their energy systems, labour markets, and urban-rural development pathways.

India can be one of them — if we learn to see waste not as a problem to be disposed off, but as a resource waiting to be utilised.

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