Avani chopped Himalayan pine needles to feed gasifiers, paying villagers to cut fire risk

Chir pine covers nearly 400,000 hectares of Uttarakhand, and one study estimates its net annual needle yield at 1.3 million tonnes. Dry needles carpet the slopes from March to June and fuel fires that harm native plants. Rajnish Jain, a management consultant, and his wife Rashmi, who founded the Avani community group in 1999, looked at biomass gasification, which had been developed in India using rice husks and coconut shells.

Officials and researchers in 2007 argued needles were too sparse to gasify. With backing from the Volkart Foundation, Jain tried chopping the needles into smaller pieces before feeding the gasifier, and it worked. In 2009 he set up what the BBC calls the world's first pine-needle power plant, 9 kWh. The leftover carbon powder is pressed into cooking briquettes.

Because slopes can't be driven on, needles must be collected by hand, and a plant needs 1.5 kilos per kWh. So Avani chose small 10-25 kWh plants. Collectors earn 2 rupees per kilo, which the article says is double the state's typical daily minimum wage over a 6-7 hour day.

Chop the needles to raise their density, so a hard-to-use forest fire fuel works in a biomass gasifier.

The needles are free, plentiful and a fire hazard, so removing them has value.

Chopping solved the density objection that had blocked the idea.

Small decentralized plants match what hand collection can supply.

Per-kilo pay gives villagers, mainly women, a steady income.

A waste that looks unusable may only need one cheap processing step, and paying locals to collect it can solve the fire risk and the income gap together.

Avani Bio Energy became a for-profit social enterprise in 2011, signed with the state utility, and a 2014 state policy covered commercial pine-needle use. By the 2020 BBC report there were seven 25 kWh plants, five owned by village entrepreneurs, plus five 10 kWh plants, with 40 more planned. One collector said she earned up to 17,000 rupees in a month. Jain says areas with consistent needle removal have had almost no fires, though that is his account.