A biogas plant.
Reliance Industries—controlled by billionaire Mukesh Ambani, India’s wealthiest person—is spending 650 billion rupees ($7.6 billion)to build compressed bio-gas facilities across the country’s southern state of Andhra Pradesh.
The company recently broke ground on the first bio-gas facility in Prakasam, a district in Andhra Pradesh, Reliance said in a statement on Wednesday.
Reliance Industries plans to develop 500 such facilities across 500,000 acres of barren and waste land in Andhra Pradesh. The project will produce 4 million tons of compressed bio-gas and 1.1 million metric tons of organic fertiliser annually when completed, Reliance said. It would create 250,000 jobs for rural youth.
“We see this project as more than energy production,” PMS Prasad, executive director of Reliance Industries, said. “It will uplift communities and boost local economies. And it will drive Andhra Pradesh’s clean energy ambitions forward.”
Using napier grass to be grown across Andhra Pradesh to produce bio-gas, Reliance said it will provide “significant livelihood” to the local economy through lease payments to farmers and a fixed price for the grass produced by farmers.
The project’s fertilizer by-product will support farmers and transform barren land into fertile farmland, according to Prasad. “We will turn waste into green wealth, energy into empowerment, and land into livelihood,” Prasad said.
Reliance Industries is diversifying its energy portfolio with an $80 billion investment plan on renewable energy projects in the next 10 to 15 years.
The conglomerate—which also has interests in petrochemicals, telecommunications, retail, media and financial services—was founded by his late father Dhirubhai Ambani, a yarn trader, in 1966 as a small textile manufacturer. After his father’s death in 2002, Ambani and his younger sibling Anil divvied up the family empire. Mukesh has a net worth of $94.3 billion, according to Forbes real-time data.
