Pakistan Private Sector Energy Project launches whitepaper on Pakistan’s biogas sector

The Pakistan Private Sector Energy Project, funded by USAID, implemented by the Private Financing Advisory Network and jointly hosted by UNIDO and REEEP, held a multi-stakeholder roundtable discussion virtually, bringing together diverse perspectives from the biogas sector. From academia, industry, small-scale farmers, government, development sector and financial institutions, these stakeholders expounded upon industry barriers and opportunities in their expert fields.

During the discussion, it was widely re-affirmed that technological and implementation bottlenecks surrounding biogas proliferation in the country must be met with nuanced understanding and multistakeholder lens, to unveil tangible learnings in various sectors to take biogas to the next level.

While Pakistan has immense potential to scale up biogas owing to its vast agricultural sector and under-utilised capacity in rural lands, biogas is yet to proliferate like other renewable resources such as solar and wind on a mass scale. To address the technical and practical lacunas in the biogas sector, this whitepaper has been formulated from the learnings of the PPSE discussion on biogas and also bringing experts on biogas on-board to conduct robust research to support discussion insights and recommendations. 

This whitepaper delves deeper in to why biogas’s proliferation in Pakistan has been hampered and explores potential and solutions via recommendations from stakeholders and market case studies from home and abroad. In particular, the potential within the private sector comprised of a diverse ecosystem ofSMEs and large corporations is explored, that have a unique opportunity to leverage biogas as both, a form of renewable energy to sustainably power operations but also produce biogas as an end product to other companies and households across the country. The objective of this whitepaper is to serve as market intelligence and a knowledge product for various private and public sector players in the biogas sector who can leverage insights, case studies and recommendations.

We thank all the participants who gave us their time and expertise to build more knowledge and publish this whitepaper with their insights, please see the “Signatories” section for the list of discussion attendees.

You can find the PPSE Biogas Whitepaper here: https://pfan.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/PPSE-Biogas-Whitepaper-Final-.pdf

This whitepaper on biogas was co-authored by:

Dr. Rabia Liaquat, Head of Department of Energy Systems Engineering, U.S.-PAKISTAN Center For Advanced Studies In Energy (USPCASE)

Muhammad Ali Qureshi, Research Fellow (Power), SAARC Energy Centre

Mavra Bari, Communications and M&E Expert, Pakistan Private Sector Energy Project