Most CBG projects that fail in India don’t fail because the technology didn’t work. They fail because nobody checked, before construction started, whether it would work for that specific site, with that specific feedstock, at that specific scale. That check has a name — a Technical Economic Feasibility Report, or TEFR — and skipping it is the single most common reason projects that started with real momentum never made it to commissioning.
What a TEFR Actually Is
A Technical Economic Feasibility Report is a detailed document that assesses the technical and economic practicality of a proposed compressed biogas project. It exists to serve investors, developers and regulators with an in-depth evaluation of a project’s feasibility, sustainability and financial viability — and its stated purpose, in the words of the consultation proposal this article is built from, is direct: risks get identified and managed early, because “the absence of such a report can lead to unforeseen challenges, cost overruns, or even complete project failure.”
That’s not a sales line. It’s a plain description of what happens when a project skips this step.
The Numbers That Make This Real
Launched in October 2018, the SATAT scheme set out to establish 5,000 CBG plants across India by 2023. By early 2021, only two plants were operational, with foundation stones laid for five more. By March 2024, 53 CBG projects had been commissioned — still far below the original target (per Waste2Wealth’s own TEFR consultation proposal). That trajectory continues to 108 plants by July 2025 against 1,094 active Letters of Intent, per REGlobal and IOCL’s own SATAT overview — see our companion piece, “SATAT: Promise vs. Reality,” for the full breakdown.
The proposal document is direct about why: “A lot of CBG projects started, however, they were either stopped midway or terminated due to their poor performance which the project developers failed to evaluate before setting up the project.”
Read that again. Not “the technology failed.” Not “the market wasn’t there.” The projects were stopped because nobody evaluated their performance risks before setup — which is precisely the gap a TEFR exists to close.
What a TEFR Actually Catches, in Three Parts
A proper feasibility study isn’t one document — it’s three distinct bodies of work, each catching a different category of risk that otherwise only surfaces after money has been spent.
Setting the right expectations. Before anything technical gets evaluated, a TEFR establishes what’s actually realistic: understanding which government policies genuinely apply to your project, confirming feedstock availability and supply chain viability, and prioritizing the technology option that actually fits your situation rather than the one that’s easiest to pitch. This is also where investor and lender confidence gets built — a bank or investor working from correct data behaves very differently than one working from a developer’s optimistic assumptions.
Detailed technical analysis. This is the part most skipped projects never had: a real evaluation of the selected site, technical risks and their mitigation, detailed feedstock analysis backed by lab test reports (not estimates), a comparison of gas dispensing methodologies, and a vetted list of qualified equipment suppliers — with a recommendation from people who’ve actually done this before, not just modeled it.
Financial feasibility and due diligence. Capital expenditure and operational expenditure estimated properly, not guessed. Return-on-investment financials built on the technical findings above, not built first and reverse-engineered. Financial risks identified with mitigation attached. And — often the part developers most want to skip — an honest look at potential buyers of the CBG and its byproducts, because an offtake agreement that exists only in a pitch deck isn’t an offtake agreement.
Skip any one of these three, and you haven’t done a lighter version of a TEFR. You’ve done a different, much riskier thing: proceeding on assumptions instead of evidence, in exactly the categories where India’s CBG sector has already shown what happens when that goes wrong.
Green Field or Brown Field — the Path Differs
Not every TEFR looks the same. A Green Field project — built on new, undeveloped land — needs the full two-stage process above, because there’s no existing infrastructure to lean on and no legacy data to shortcut the analysis. A Brown Field project, developed as an extension to an already-operating facility (a sugar mill, distillery, food processing plant, or a bulk fuel consumer like a paper mill, steel factory or cement plant), starts from a stronger position and uses the single, combined Detailed Survey stage instead — because feedstock, site access, and often even some of the stakeholder relationships already exist.
Knowing which category your project falls into changes not just the process, but the price and the timeline — worth confirming before assuming either path applies to you.
Conclusion
The evidence for why a TEFR matters isn’t hypothetical — it’s the actual trajectory of India’s CBG sector: a 5,000-plant target, two plants operational three years later, and a shortfall the industry’s own consultation materials attribute directly to developers who didn’t evaluate performance risk before building. A feasibility study costs a small fraction of a plant’s capital cost and exists specifically to catch the categories of risk — feedstock, technical, financial — that have already sunk a majority of the projects that started without one.
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Backlinking note
External sources linked in this piece: REGlobal, IOCL SATAT overview — same sources already used in the SATAT newsletter; no duplicate outreach needed if that note was already sent.