India asks its carbon-intensive industries — like power generation and mining — to get 10 percent of their yearly energy quotient from clean sources. The regulations currently aren’t widely heeded, but the Executive Director of Ramky Enviro Engineers, Goutham Reddy, tells Bloomberg that he thinks that the government will soon get much more strict about environmental regulations.

The growing amount of waste in India can be a valuable resource. India has a population of 1.2 billion and an increasing amount of those people are living in cities. India’s cities now generate 55 million tons of solid waste and 38 billion liters of sewage per year, according to consulting firm Energy Alternatives India and cited by Bloomberg.

The waste per capita is also rising in India as GDP grows. The rapidly growing Indian middle class will soon want to consume similar amounts of power to the U.S. and Europe, and that will require a massive power infrastructure build out in the country. India plans to add 100 GW of power generation over the next several years, and that will be made up by mostly coal and clean power.

The Indian government is infamous for setting lofty goals and then coming up quite short of those numbers. “Aspirational goals” is what many call them. For example, the Indian government has a top-down plan to deliver 20 GW of solar across the country by 2020. We detailed some of the realities of the growing pains of the Indian solar market here.

If Ramky Enviro Engineers raises the funds it wants in an IPO, it will spend close to $100 million on a 48 MW waste to energy plant in Hyderabad. The company is already profitable off of its waste management business. U.S.-based Waste Management has also been interested in waste to power plants.

Waste to power plants are still rare in India. They are more common on European countries like Germany. Agnion Energy is a German startup that has developed a gasification process that can turn trash into energy.

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Enerkem gasifies various forms of waste — everything from old telephone poles to mixed municipal garbage — and then turns that syngas into various fuels including methanol and ethanol. Valero is on one side of Enerkem’s supply chain, and could work with Enerkem on commercial relationships to process and sell the fuels. Waste Management is on the other side of Enerkem’s supply chain, and we could envision Enerkem working with Waste Management’s trash supply.

Enerkem has a couple of facilities in the works. One in Westbury, Quebec, which at one point was expected to produce about 1.5 million gallons per year of methanol from old telephone poles, with ethanol next on the list of biofuels to produce. Another plant, which is expected to cost $70 million and could crank out about 10 million gallons of ethanol per year, is being planned with Greenfield Ethanol, Canada’s largest ethanol producer, right next to an Edmonton, Alberta municipal composting facility. And there’s also a 10 to 20 million gallon per year, $200 million plant, in the works in Pontotoc, Miss., adjacent to a municipal waste dump, which Enerkem expects to break ground on this year.

Enerkem has received significant U.S. government support for that last Mississippi plant. In January, the USDA awarded Enerkem a conditional commitment for an $80 million loan guarantee to build it, which also followed on a $50 million Department of Energy grant. With this latest funding, Enerkem has raised about $130 million in equity funding, and received $130 million (combo of grant and loan guarantee) from the U.S. government. Trash to fuel technology seems to have gotten more attention in 2011, compared to making cellulosic ethanol from energy crops and agriculture waste.

However, even with this bright funding spot, the next-generation of biofuel production has been creeping forward. There have been three biofuel IPOs in the last 12 months — Gevo, Amyris and Solazyme — but these three companies are not yet producing biofuels at scale, and are instead making sales either off of specialty bio products like cosmetics, or reselling standard corn-based ethanol.

It will ultimately be the giants like Valero and Waste Management that will be able to get these biofuel products to scale. Both Valero and Waste Management are investing in quite a few biofuel and waste product companies. Valero has backed Mascoma, and has also taken stakes in algae fuel maker Solix Biofuels, and cellulosic ethanol maker ZeaChem.

Waste Management strategically invested in German company Agnion Energy, which invented a waste gasification process based on something called the heatpipe-reformer design. Waste management has backed startup Agilyx, which has developed technology that can turn plastic otherwise headed for the landfill, into a synthetic crude oil. And earlier this year, Waste Management announced a partnership with Genomatica, a San Diego, Calif.-based startup with a platform to create genetically modified organisms to turn biogas into a variety of industrial chemicals.

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