Reliance Industries Ltd, the owner of world's largest single-location oil refining complex, will set up 100 CBG plants to convert agri-waste into gas, its chairman Mukesh Ambani said on Monday. Speaking at RIL annual shareholder meeting (AGM), he said after setting up two demo units for compressed biogas (CBG) at Jamnagar, Reliance has commissioned the first commercial scale CBG plant at Barabanki in Uttar Pradesh in a record time of just 10 months.
"We will rapidly scale this up to 25 CBG plants across India. Our target is to establish 100 CBG plants in the next 5 years, consuming 5.5 million tonnes of agro-residue and organic waste, thereby mitigating nearly 2 million tonnes of carbon emissions, and producing 2.5 million tonnes of organic manure annually," he said. This would result in reduction of about 7 million tonnes per annum of imported LNG, he mentioned.
Ambani during his speech said, "We have embarked transitioning O2C business into a sustainable and green business. The key pillars of this transition are – One, we are accelerating our journey to achieve Net Zero by 2035 through renewables and bioenergy." "With our valued partner BP, we have revived gas production from the KG-D6 block from near zero a few years back to about 20 million cubic meters per day in the financial year 2022-23," he noted.
"We are well on our way to enhance gas production to 30 million standard cubic meters per day, which will be 30 per cent of India's gas production, and 15 per cent of its current gas demand. At a time when global energy supplies and prices are witnessing unprecedented volatility and uncertainty, this gas is a major source of clean energy saving up to $7 billion per annum imports for our country," he said.
Meanwhile, the board of Reliance met ahead of the company's annual general meeting to approve the appointment of twins Isha and Akash as well as Anant, as the "non-executive directors of the company," the firm said in a stock exchange filing.