Bio-fuel Case Study - Vedanta Power

The Stubble to Bio-fuel Project

Every harvest season, farmers in Punjab burn leftover paddy stubble to clear their fields quickly. In district Mansa, that stubble now powers a grid instead.

Vedanta Power Talwandi Sabo Thermal Plant in Punjab is a 1,980 MW thermal power facility, located in the heart of one of India's most agriculturally active regions.

The Rule That Started It All

In 2021, the Commission for Air Quality Management (CAQM) directed all coal based thermal power plants to blend at least 5% biomass pellets with coal during power generation — a process called biomass co-firing.
For most thermal plants, meeting this target was the end goal.
At Talwandi Sabo Thermal Plant, it became the starting point for something much larger.

What the Project Does?

Collects paddy stubble, the crop residue farmers would otherwise burn.
Processes it into compressed, energy-dense pellets.
Co-fires those pellets with coal for thermal power generation.

What That Creates?

Bio-fuel from waste.
Stubble termed as waste earlier becomes an income for the farmer.
A seasonal air quality crisis becomes a circular economy in motion.

Compliance was the ask. A working ecosystem was the answer.

Tackling Three Problems with
One Solution

Stubble burning in Punjab was not one problem - it was three: economic, environmental, and logistical. No single fix had worked before. Talwandi Sabo Thermal Plant chose to address all three at once.

The Behavioural Gap

The fires kept burning, because the farmers knew no better, nor did they have better options.

Burning was the fastest, cheapest way to clear land before the next crop, it never stopped despite several efforts and regulations.
The CAQM mandate created industrial pressure, but in the absence of stubble management solutions and a reliable market for biomass, farmers had little reason to abandon field burning.

The Infrastructure Gap

The raw material existed but the system to use it did not.

Talwandi Sabo Thermal Plant required a specific kind of biomass: torrefied pellets, thermally treated, energy-dense, and technically complex to produce.
No nearby pellet manufacturing capacity existed.
No established supply chain network was in-place.

The Economic Gap

For farmers, burning stubble was not a welcoming habit, it was a financial calculation.

Every decision at the farm was driven by time and cost.
Any alternative to burning had to make immediate economic sense.
For stubble to stop burning, it had to start earning.

The task was not to fix one gap in isolation, it was to close all three, simultaneously, at scale, within a single harvest cycle.

A Sustainable Ecosystem Built to Scale

Responding to a directive is one thing. Building the infrastructure, the partnerships, and the farmers’ network to sustain it — that is another. Vedanta Power Talwandi Sabo Thermal Plant did both.

The Supply Chain

13 specialist vendors, 2 torrefied biomass pellet plants, and a combined capacity of 1,000 metric tonnes per day.

No torrefied biomass supply chain existed in Mansa region when this project began, it was built from scratch.
13 specialist vendors onboarded to supply torrefied biomass pellets.
2 dedicated pellet manufacturing plants commissioned by partners of Talwandi Sabo Thermal Plant.
Combined processing capacity: 1,000 metric tonnes per day.
Technical support extended by the power plant.

The Farmer

3,800+ farmers, 26 villages, 1 district, brought into one coordinated transition.

Anti-stubble burning campaign conceptualised under Project Navi Disha to bring farmers into the eco-system.
3,800+ farmers engaged across Mansa, Bathinda, Sangrur, Muktsar, and Barnala districts.
Outreach through awareness camps, street plays, school rallies, and village programmes.
PUSA decomposer demonstrations provided a no-cost field alternative.
Stubble moved from a liability to asset.

The Biomass Plant

Biomass quality-checked and cleared in under 8 minutes from process start.

Systems at the thermal plant were upgraded to handle biomass at scale.
Auger-based sampling cut quality-check time to under 8 minutes per load.
SAP-based digital tracking enabled end-to-end visibility from field to furnace.
Continuous calibration of binder composition and volatile matter improved blend stability and prevented furnace incidents.

Three connected systems. One circular economy. What was waste is now generating value.

Transforming the Planet.
Transforming for Good.

Numbers only tell a part of the story. Here is where our Stubble-to-Biofuel model made a measurable difference paving the way for industrial benchmark for the sector.

On The Record

Recognition for the project

A Clean Energy Model. Mansa, Punjab.

The Stubble-to-Biofuel Project has not only been recognised regionally by the local authorities of Mansa District but also nationally by SAMARTH (National Mission on Use of Biomass in Coal Based Thermal Power Plants) by Ministry of Power, and featured by the global trade body International Chamber of Commerce as a ‘Clean Energy Model’. It aligns with the stated goals of the Ministry of Power and the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, and is being studied as a practical, scalable template for industrial-scale circular economy in India.

It has been our consistent endeavour to make stubble-burning prevention a long-term, sustainable model for the district. Talwandi Sabo Thermal Plant's 360-degree approach, supporting stubble management, enabling farmers to sell paddy straw rather than burn it, and converting this residue into clean energy, has played a significant role in this transition. The sharp decline in farm fires across the region reflects the impact of this collaborative effort.

Mrs. Navjot Kaur

I.A.S., Deputy Commissioner of District of Mansa, Govt. of Punjab

From burning fields to clean energy, the Stubble-to-Biofuel project has built a large-scale circular system, turning crop residue into power, farm waste into an economic opportunity and a regional compliance requirement into an industry benchmark.