A Japanese startup ran a rocket engine on liquefied cattle manure in 2023 — not a stunt, but 99%-pure methane that matched rocket-grade propellant. India spent early 2026 testing its own methane engines, from ISRO's national programme down to a private Gujarat startup that built one on biomethane specifically. The two threads haven't been tied together yet. This piece lays out why India's existing, underperforming biogas scheme is the raw material for exactly that.
Energy · Space · Biogas
Cow Dung Already Flew a Rocket Engine. India's Biogas Programme Could Feed the Next One.
Published · v1.0.0 · Interstellar Technologies, December 2023 static-fire announcement · ISRO/OMSPACE, January–May 2026 test reports
The world-first: rocket fuel from a dairy farm
Japan's Interstellar Technologies proved the chemistry works in December 2023.
Interstellar Technologies (IST), a Hokkaido-based small-satellite launch company, partnered with Air Water Group to build a genuinely circular supply chain: dairy farmers in the Tokachi region feed cattle manure into on-farm biogas equipment; a fermentation plant on a dairy farm in Taiki processes the manure into raw biogas; the gas is trucked to an Air Water factory in Obihiro, where the methane is separated and liquefied to over 99% purity — comparable to conventional rocket-grade propellant. In December 2023, IST static-fired a prototype of its “Zero” engine on that liquid biomethane (LBM) at Hokkaido Spaceport, holding ten seconds of stable combustion — a world-first for a private rocket company. Zero itself is designed as an orbital small-launch vehicle roughly 25 metres tall, comparable in scale to Rocket Lab's Electron, targeting around 1,000 kg to low Earth orbit.
India's 2026 methane push — and which part of it is actually biogas
Four programmes, only one of them running on anything renewable.
India ran a genuinely busy few months of methane-engine testing in 2026. ISRO tested a sub-scale thrust chamber for its own LOX-Methane engine at the Propulsion Complex in Mahendragiri, Tamil Nadu, on 27 January 2026, aimed at the reusable Next Generation Launch Vehicle (NGLV); the agency is separately planning a liquid-methane production plant at the same site, using LNG as feedstock. Skyroot Aerospace had earlier (November 2021) test-fired “Dhawan-1,” India's first fully cryogenic privately built engine, running on LNG (over 90% methane) and LOX, at a Solar Industries facility in Nagpur — a roughly 1.5 kN-thrust upper-stage engine for its Vikram-2 orbital vehicle. Gujarat-based OMSPACE has run two separate milestones in 2026: on 14 March 2026 it flew a single-stage sub-orbital sounding rocket — Gujarat's first privately developed rocket launch — and separately, in May 2026, it unveiled India's first fully cryogenic bio-methane and LOX engine, delivering 10 kN of thrust for reusable launch vehicles.
Exhibit 1
India's 2026 methane-engine activity, and which fuel each one actually uses
LNG (fossil natural gas, >90% methane) and biomethane (renewable, from anaerobic digestion) are chemically similar as propellants but are not the same fuel or the same supply chain.
| Programme | Fuel | Milestone |
|---|---|---|
| ISRO LOX-Methane (NGLV) | LNG (fossil), sub-scale test | Sub-scale thrust chamber test, 27 Jan 2026 |
| Skyroot Aerospace, “Dhawan-1” (Nov 2021) | LNG, >90% methane (fossil) | India's first private fully cryogenic engine test-fire |
| OMSPACE, bio-methane/LOX engine | Bio-methane (renewable) | India's first bio-methane cryogenic engine, unveiled May 2026; 10kN thrust |
| OMSPACE, Infinity-One sounding rocket | — (sub-orbital test flight) | Gujarat's first private rocket launch, 14 March 2026 |
Compiled from ISRO's official testing announcement, Bloomberg's June 2026 semi-cryogenic engine coverage, Indian Defence News' reporting on Skyroot and OMSPACE, and YourStory/StartupPedia profiles of OMSPACE, all 2026. This article did not independently verify thrust figures against a primary technical datasheet for either private company.
Only OMSPACE, among the four, is explicitly running on biomethane rather than fossil LNG. ISRO's and Skyroot's methane programmes are chemically adjacent to Japan's story — methane is methane, whatever feedstock it started from — but they are not, today, running on anything renewable. That distinction matters for the rest of this article: India already has a live biomethane-rocket engine and a live national biogas-production scheme, and as of this research, nothing publicly connects the two.
The feedstock India already has, and isn't yet pointing at rockets
A national biogas scheme running well behind its own target — which is also the opportunity.
India's SATAT scheme set a target of 5,000 compressed biogas (CBG) plants. Per the government's own 6 August 2026 Cabinet announcement, a cluster of earlier schemes — SATAT, the Market Development Assistance (MDA) scheme for organic manure, the Biomass Aggregation Machinery (BAM) scheme, the Development of Pipeline Infrastructure (DPI) scheme, and Central Financial Assistance (CFA) under the National Bioenergy Programme — had together commissioned over 200 CBG plants as of that date, still a small fraction of the 5,000-plant target. In response, the Union Cabinet approved GOBARdhan, India's National Unified Scheme for Compressed Biogas, at a ₹23,731 crore outlay running FY2026-27 to FY2035-36, administered by the Ministry of Petroleum and Natural Gas and explicitly aiming to increase domestic CBG production roughly tenfold. The scheme names its feedstocks explicitly: agricultural residue, cattle dung, press mud, and municipal organic waste.
GOBARdhan bundles six components, and two of them go directly to the economics of a rocket-grade biomethane plant. A stable administered CBG price of ₹2,110 per MMBTU is guaranteed for a minimum ten-year horizon, giving any new plant — including one built for aerospace-grade purity — a floor of revenue certainty Japan's IST/Air Water venture had to build without. Separately, capital assistance of up to ₹2 crore per tonne-per-day (TPD) of installed capacity is available to eligible greenfield projects, and the scheme text explicitly extends this beyond core plant machinery to feedstock-aggregation and value-chain assets — the kind of upstream investment a purification step to rocket-grade purity would need. The remaining four components (an offtake-assurance framework tied to the CNG/PNG blending obligation of 3% in FY2026-27, 4% in FY2027-28 and 5% from FY2028-29; pipeline-infrastructure support; a credit-guarantee mechanism for MSME-based projects; and a CBG Ecosystem Challenge Fund for district-level feedstock mapping) are built for the vehicle-fuel and city-gas market GOBARdhan primarily targets, not for aerospace offtake — but nothing in the scheme's design excludes a plant from selling into both.
From IS 16087 to rocket-grade: what the purity gap actually is
The Indian standard for CBG stops well short of what a combustion chamber needs.
India's compressed biogas is not unregulated: IS 16087, the Bureau of Indian Standards specification for “Biogas (Biomethane)” (first issued 2013, revised 2016 and again in 2025), sets the quality bar every CBG plant selling into vehicles or a piped network must clear. This article read the requirements table in the 2013 edition directly; later revisions may have tightened individual limits, but the structure — and the size of the gap to rocket-grade fuel — is unlikely to have changed.
Exhibit 2
IS 16087:2013 CBG specification versus what a rocket engine needs
Both are “biomethane.” Only one is built to run a fuel-system without contaminant buildup at cryogenic temperatures and combustion-chamber pressures.
| Parameter, unit & direction | IS 16087:2013 (CBG, automotive/piped) | Rocket-grade liquid methane |
|---|---|---|
| Methane (CH4), % min | 90 | 99 (GOST R 56021-2014 Grade A cited here only as a reference point, not an agreed standard — see below) |
| CO2 + N2 + O2 (combined), % max | 10 | Trace — each inert gas independently limited to protect combustion stability and regenerative cooling |
| CO2 alone, % max (cylinder-fill use) | 4 | Trace; residual CO2 can freeze solid at cryogenic transfer temperatures and block fuel lines |
| Moisture, mg/m³ max | 16 | Effectively zero; any water freezes out in the liquefaction train and must be removed upstream |
| H2S, mg/m³ max | 30.3 | Not separately tabulated in the sources reviewed here, but H2S is corrosive to engine hardware and would need to be scrubbed well below CBG tolerance |
| Governing standard | IS 16087, a settled national specification | No internationally agreed rocket-propellant-grade methane standard exists yet, per the peer-reviewed literature cited below — each launch programme currently sets its own internal tolerance |
CBG figures read directly from Table 1, IS 16087:2013, Bureau of Indian Standards. Rocket-grade methane purity and standards-gap finding — Chemical Safety Science journal (2025) review of methane fuel requirements for liquid-propellant rocket engines, and a MDPI Aerospace (2022) study on the effects of trace compounds in liquefied methane on rocket engine operation.
The practical reading of Exhibit 2: CBG cleared for an Indian city-gas network is roughly two purity grades away from what IST fed its Zero engine, and the components a rocket cares about most — residual CO2, moisture, heavier hydrocarbons — are exactly the ones CBG's automotive-grade tolerance leaves the most room for. Closing that gap is a real, well-understood engineering problem, not a hypothetical one; the technology to do it is already deployed at scale in the conventional LNG and biogas-upgrading industries.
The gap between what CBG-grade biogas produces and what a rocket engine needs is real and this article does not minimise it: IST's fuel is refined to over 99% methane purity through a dedicated liquefaction step at Air Water's Obihiro plant, a purification stage beyond ordinary vehicle-grade CBG. GOBARdhan's capital-assistance and challenge-fund components make that kind of additional investment financeable in principle; nothing in the scheme text names aerospace-grade output as an eligible use case, so this remains this article's own extrapolation, not a stated government objective. OMSPACE's own bio-methane engine does not, as far as this article's research could establish, source its fuel from India's SATAT/GOBARdhan network at all — the connection this article draws between India's biogas policy and India's biomethane rocket engine is a structural opportunity, not yet a confirmed supply relationship.
Sources. Interstellar Technologies' liquid biomethane engine and Air Water's Hokkaido Tokachi supply chain — Interstellar Technologies Inc., official December 2023 announcement (istellartech.com/en_news/8186); contemporaneous coverage via Interesting Engineering, Space.com, and the Anaerobic Digestion & Biogas Blog. ISRO LOX-Methane sub-scale test and NGLV programme — ISRO official testing announcement (isro.gov.in), 27 January 2026, and Indian Defence News coverage of the planned Mahendragiri liquid-methane plant. Skyroot Aerospace “Dhawan-1” engine — contemporaneous trade-press reporting on India's first privately built fully cryogenic engine test. OMSPACE bio-methane/LOX engine, Infinity-One reusable launch vehicle, and the 14 March 2026 Gujarat sounding-rocket flight — Indian Defence News, YourStory and StartupPedia profiles of OMSPACE, all 2026; this article could not independently verify OMSPACE's stated thrust and fuel-source figures against a primary technical document. India's CBG plant count (200+ commissioned), the GOBARdhan/National Unified Scheme for Compressed Biogas's ₹23,731 crore outlay, FY2026-27–FY2035-36 timeline, six-component structure (offtake assurance, the ₹2,110/MMBTU administered price with a ten-year horizon, capital assistance up to ₹2 crore/TPD, pipeline infrastructure, credit guarantee support, and the CBG Ecosystem Challenge Fund), named feedstocks, and the CNG/PNG blending obligation trajectory — read directly from the Prime Minister's Office's official press release, “Cabinet approves GOBARdhan, India's National Unified Scheme for Compressed Biogas, with an outlay of Rs.23,731 crore,” pmindia.gov.in, 6 August 2026. IS 16087:2013 CBG composition requirements (Exhibit 2) — Table 1, “Biogas (Biomethane) — Specification,” Bureau of Indian Standards, February 2013, read directly from the standard text. Rocket-grade methane purity threshold and the absence of an internationally agreed propellant-grade methane standard — “Requirements for methane as a fuel for liquid-propellant rocket engines,” Chemical Safety Science, 2025, and “Effects of Compounds in Liquefied Methane on Rocket Engine Operation,” MDPI Aerospace, 2022. Membrane-based biogas upgrading performance figures (methane recovery up to 98%, retentate purity, relative cost reduction) — Air Liquide Advanced Separations' published biogas-purification technology overview and industry-blog aggregation of CO2-separation membrane performance from Toray, Evonik and MTR; the cost-reduction figure is secondary-source reporting this article could not independently verify against a primary study. Cryogenic flash-separation mechanics in gas liquefaction — general natural-gas and LNG process-engineering patent literature on flash-gas nitrogen rejection, used here for the underlying physics rather than as a claim about any specific plant's equipment. Cold box / brazed aluminium heat exchanger design and small-scale LNG liquefaction processes (PRICO, IPSMR, Optimized Cascade) — Chart Industries' published product literature on brazed aluminium heat exchangers and LNG liquefaction plants, and EnFlex Group's small-scale LNG process-plant literature; these are equipment-vendor sources describing general industry practice, not confirmation that any specific bio-LNG plant discussed in this article uses this exact configuration. Diagrams — the two-stage membrane upgrading scheme is Figure 6 from Janusz-Cygan, Jaschik & Tańczyk (2021), Membranes 11(12):938, DOI 10.3390/membranes11120938; the single mixed-refrigerant liquefaction flowsheet is Figure 1 from Wu, Wang, Dai, Ge & Liu (2021), Frontiers in Energy Research 9:766588, DOI 10.3389/fenrg.2021.766588. Both are open-access articles licensed CC BY 4.0 and are illustrative of general industry process design, not diagrams of any specific plant named in this article.
GOBARdhan and AHIDF are financing opposite ends of the same supply chain. This blog's piece on AHIDF's ₹19,751 crore in animal-husbandry loans covers the dairy and feed-plant credit line building the herd-side capacity that supplies the cattle dung this scheme names as a core CBG feedstock — without that upstream base growing, GOBARdhan's tenfold production target has nothing to scale on. It also sits in the same biofuels policy cluster as this blog's coverage of India's ethanol overcapacity and the alcohol-to-jet sustainable aviation fuel (SAF) pathway and the full CBG incentive stack — three fuel-and-feedstock schemes competing for the same agricultural and livestock residue streams.
About this article: Researched, written and edited by Umashankar Triplicane Dwarakanathan, with AI research assistance; every figure is meant to trace to the primary source cited. See the Editorial Policy for how sourcing, AI use and corrections work.
