Driving sustainable energy and waste solutions with Ankur Scientific

In this episode of the Green Guardian Series, we spoke with Ankur Jain, Managing Director of Ankur Scientific Energy Technologies Pvt. Ltd. With an MBA in Marketing and Strategy from IIM Bangalore and a background in Mechanical Engineering, he brings a unique blend of technical expertise and business acumen. His leadership has shaped Ankur Scientific into a key player in sustainable energy and waste management solutions.

He shares insights into the company’s evolving focus—energy solutions, innovative waste processing technologies, and carbon sequestration. He discusses the critical role of bridging R&D with market needs, ensuring that emerging technologies are both viable and impactful in addressing global sustainability challenges.

IBT: Sustainability has different meanings to different organizations, how does Ankur Scientific define sustainability, and how do your technology, energy and waste management systems align with the vision for a cleaner future ?

Mr. Ankur Jain: I think sustainability, for me personally, means that we have to use as few resources from this planet as possible. But having said that, you do end up using resources all the time. You’re using various things in your day to day lives, and there is various types of waste that gets generated. As a company, our focus has been to try and use these wastes as efficiently as possible to generate various forms of energy and also to generate something like biochar, which is used for carbon sequestration. That is the vision which Ankur Scientific has, we want to use waste resources as efficiently as possible to convert them into usable forms of energy.

IBT: Your distributed municipality solid waste to energy systems are addressing critical urban and rural waste challenges. How do these solutions stand out from conventional technologies and what makes them scalable for towns and cities of all sizes?

Mr. Ankur Jain: When we set out to make these machines, one of the things we noticed was that if you look at the typical solid waste technologies available in the market, you had either something that was very large scale or something that was only available for wet waste, nothing really for dry waste. If you look at 90% of population in India, they probably lives in smaller towns where there wasn’t any option to handle 50 tons or 100 tons per day of waste. When you have incineration technology, you need at least about 500 tons per day to make it financially viable, our approach has been more distributed in nature, because we are using a resource that is distributed, and transporting waste over large distances which doesn’t make sense so our equipment is geared towards handling waste in a distributed manner.

IBT: Could you explain how biochar contributes to improving soil health, enhancing productivity and its stored in mitigating greenhouse gas emissions? How is it contributing to that?

Mr. Ankur Jain: If you look at the world now, there are talks about limiting earth’s temperature rise to about two degrees and to keep the rise in temperature below two degrees, we have to do two things. We have to avoid adding more CO2 in the climate, for which we need more renewable technologies and at the same time we need to start removing carbon from the air as well. Biochar is a leading resource which manages to do that. Biochar is made when different kind of wastes are put in a kiln and burned in a controlled, nearly oxygen free environment. Essentially we end up taking CO2 from the air and putting it into the soil and the CO2 is not really harming the soil. Typically biochar has high permanence and it doesn’t degrade till about 100 years or more. There are multiple studies which show that biochar actually acts as a resource, it captures nutrients, fertilizers, water, and releases it at a slow pace, which is ideal for plant growth. There have large experiments done in Peru to show the benefits Biochar has on crops.

IBT: You have collaborated with organizations like Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, could you share some insights about it and how such partnerships accelerate sustainable advancements in energy and waste processing?

Mr. Ankur Jain: We started working with the Melanie Gates Foundation about 10 years ago. They developed a technology to handle liquid waste, which is human faecal waste and they wanted companies like ours to come in, improve the technology and then help them market the technology. We are one of their three licensees in the world for the technology and we have set up this project in various parts of the world. The BMG’s focus has been getting into a difficult sector, making a technology, and then trying to create an ecosystem so that this technology could expand, and that is exactly what we are trying to do with them.

IBT: Ankur scientific has shifted towards converting syngas into fuels and chemicals like ethanol and hydrogen reflects a forward looking strategy. So how do you foresee these technologies transforming the energy landscape, particularly in India?

Mr. Ankur Jain: Initially we were doing biomass to gas, the gas would then be used for heat generation or power generation. From a business perspective, one of the issues we noticed was that power is highly regulated wherever you work in most countries. It’s not easy to do equipment sale for a power plant and the regulations make it more challenging and difficult. The energy from biomass was something you wanted to become more mobile, like a commodity, so that you could sell it wherever the price is right, which is where we started our journey into ethanol, hydrogen and methanol. We saw that syngas anyway has hydrogen and carbon monoxide both so why not convert the syngas into various fuels and chemicals. Now the policies are coming around as well, if you look at India, we have blending policies for ethanol into gasoline and we are already at 10% going to 15%,20%, 25% till 2030.  Hydrogen is being talked about everywhere and the government even has a hydrogen mission. I think our idea has always been developed technology, roll out these technologies, see how they play out, and then focus on what works best. I think the world itself is looking at various technologies. Something will play out, something will not play out but we’ve always wanted to be on the forefront of technology, which is why we are doing what we are doing.

IBT: Developing cutting edge waste management and energy solutions comes with its own challenges. What would be technological, operational or market hurdles or challenges has Ankur scientific encountered, and how have you addressed them?

Mr. Ankur Jain: The technology development obviously takes a fair amount of time, we have to spend a lot of money in R&D, and we are a self-funded organization. We don’t take money from anywhere  but that’s what we’ve been doing forever and  we are happy to do that. Then we need to be able to demonstrate the technology, we need pilot units so that we could go to a customer and talk to them about our technology, and if they are interested in doing a pilot testing. Once the pilot is done, that is where the marketing starts. Now, the challenges  with a bunch of these technologies is that you end up working in sectors where the government is very involved, for example waste to energy industry. You’re typically working with corporations, municipalities, etc, and if it’s not something that’s relevant for them, then it becomes so much more challenging. I believe if I look at the country today, it’s a challenging environment for waste to energy industry, because while we started collecting our waste, there still aren’t  policies for its treatment and that is where we need to go.

IBT: Ankur Scientifics indigenously developed technologies which are making an impact in over 35 countries. How do you envision the company’s global expansion evolving in the coming years, and what role do you see innovation playing in shaping that vision?

Mr. Ankur Jain: We were able to market to 35 countries because people see us as an innovative company so whenever they’re looking for a gasifier manufacturer, they would typically end up talking to us. I think what we’re trying to do is that there are various sectors we are working in, like we are working in syngas side, which is power and heat, we are working in fuels and chemicals, we are working on the carbon sequestration side using biochar and then we have the BMG technology, which is for faecal waste. The idea is that over the last 7-8, years, we’ve done a fair bit of work in technology. We have set up our pilots, we have set up a few commercial installations and now, it is the time to expand and consolidate, so we are just trying to see where we can market more and more.