LAHORE: Academics at a British university have secured government funding to build Pakistan’s first full-scale plant that converts agricultural waste into clean energy, a project organizers say could cut into both the country’s smog crisis and its multibillion-dollar coal import bill.
Northumbria University’s School of Engineering, Physics and Mathematics is leading the initiative, called Safer Plus, which will turn cotton stalks and sugarcane waste into biofuel at a commercial-scale facility in Punjab province. The project has been awarded nearly £1.25 million ($1.6 million) by the U.K. government.
A waste problem hiding in plain sight
Pakistan generates roughly 49.6 million tons of solid waste every year, a figure that has been climbing more than 2% annually as the country’s population grows, according to estimates cited by the U.S. International Trade Administration and Pakistan’s Ministry of Climate Change.
Only about 60% to 70% of that waste is collected in major cities, leaving much of the rest to pile up in open plots, drains and waterways.
Agricultural residue adds a separate, largely unmanaged layer to that burden. The Food and Agriculture Organization estimates Pakistan produces around 69 million tons of crop stubble annually.
In Punjab’s wheat-rice belt, which covers more than 80% of the province’s cropped area, farmers burn several million tons of leftover rice straw each winter simply to clear fields in time for wheat sowing, according to research from the International Growth Centre. Cotton stalks and sugarcane waste face similar disposal problems after harvest.
That burning is a major contributor to the smog that blankets Punjab, including Lahore, every winter, alongside vehicle emissions, industrial pollution and stubble burning that drifts across the border from India.
Punjab’s government has tried bans, fines of up to 50,000 rupees per acre and machinery subsidies to curb the practice, with limited success, largely because farmers have had no market for the residue and few affordable alternatives to burning it.
How the plant will work
The Safer Plus facility will convert cotton stalks and sugarcane waste into bio-coal pellets through torrefaction, a heating process that produces a dense, coal-like fuel. Developers say the pellets could replace imported coal in brick kilns and textile mill boilers at 40% to 50% lower cost.
“Pakistan spends over $2.5 billion every year importing coal to power its industries, while millions of tonnes of crop residue are burned in fields because there is no market for it,” said Dr. Jibran Khaliq, one of the academics leading the project.
Three Pakistani textile manufacturers have signed letters of commitment to trial the bio-coal as boiler fuel, giving the project a built-in customer base before construction is complete.
“What makes this project different is that we are not proposing another laboratory study,” Khaliq said. “We have spent six years developing the knowledge, and now we are building a live commercial facility with three textile mills already committed to using the fuel. This is the step that turns research findings into an investable, replicable business that Pakistan can own and scale.”
A new income stream for rural women
The project’s supply chain is built around a women-led biomass cooperative that will collect and deliver the agricultural waste. According to Northumbria University, women in rural South Punjab typically spend three to six hours a day gathering fuelwood, often as unpaid labor on family farms.
Through the cooperative, more than 120 households near the plant will receive formal payment for material that farmers currently pay to have removed. At least 60% of training positions tied to the project are reserved for women, and payments will go directly into their personal mobile wallets, giving them independent control over their earnings rather than routing income through male relatives.
Fitting into a broader energy shift
The plant lands amid a wider transformation in how Pakistan generates power. Facing chronic electricity shortages, a heavy reliance on imported fuel and repeated foreign exchange crunches, Pakistan has set a target of drawing 60% of its electricity from renewable sources, including hydropower, by 2030, with a narrower goal of 30% from wind, solar and hydro combined under some official plans.
Solar power has expanded the fastest. It became the country’s largest single source of electricity in 2025, supplying more than a quarter of total generation, according to figures compiled in Wikipedia’s tracking of Pakistani power data and corroborated by International Energy Agency reporting that Pakistan added roughly 10 gigawatts of new solar capacity in 2025 alone, growth driven almost entirely by households and businesses installing their own rooftop and off-grid systems as electricity prices climbed.
Pakistan imported more solar panels than any other country in the world in 2024, according to the same tracking data. Wind power, concentrated in Sindh’s coastal corridor, contributes a smaller but steady share of the grid, and bagasse, sugarcane residue burned at sugar mills, already supplies roughly 1% of national generation, according to 2026 sector analysis.
Government officials have described the current push toward renewables as central to managing energy costs under International Monetary Fund-linked budget constraints, alongside efforts to renegotiate power-purchase agreements with independent power producers and to promote electric vehicles.
Why the model matters
Waste-to-energy projects like Safer Plus attack several of Pakistan’s problems at once, which is part of why energy researchers and development groups have pushed for more of them. Crop residue that would otherwise be burned, worsening air quality that studies suggest costs Pakistanis years of life expectancy, instead displaces imported coal, which drains foreign currency reserves the country can ill afford to lose.
The approach also creates a formal, traceable income stream in rural areas where women’s labor has historically gone uncompensated, and it gives industrial energy users a domestically produced fuel priced well below the imported alternative.
Because the project pairs a commercial off-take agreement with textile mills, rather than relying solely on subsidy or pilot funding, its backers argue it offers a template that could be replicated across other agricultural regions of Pakistan, including areas that grow wheat, maize or other residue-heavy crops, without requiring the state to build or subsidize each new facility itself.
If the Punjab plant proves the economics work at commercial scale, similar cooperative-supplied torrefaction plants could, in principle, be built wherever crop burning and industrial coal demand currently coexist, turning what is now an annual air-quality liability into a recurring rural income source and a cheaper industrial fuel supply.
