Willem Christiaens

Development of Biomass Gasification Technology in India: an Analysis with Strategic Niche Management Willem Christiaens

This work analyses the development of biomass gasification in India, where it takes off with presenting brief historical narrative of past experiments and commercial installations. The analysis adopts the framework of Strategic Niche Management in its analysis and applies it to draw conclusions on the past and future development of the technology. With the high expectations on the technology's applicability after the first lab scale experiments, hundreds of small scale gasifiers where deployed throughout rural India with mixed success. Previous expectations proved wrong and new applications for the technology where sought. The technology demonstrated to be easier to use in the Industrial setting where it competed with diesel fired burners that gradually became expensive to operate due to increasing fossil fuel prices. Also other niches where found for the technology to work in successfully such as crematoria. The research is partially based on an 8 month field study where over 40 stakeholders have been interviewed and gasifier installations have been visited.