The availability of land for biomass production, the various biomass production options, biomass productivity rates, financial viability, investment required to produce biomass for energy and the barriers to biomass production are analysed. The scenarios considered for estimating the biomass potential are incremental biomass demand, sustainable biomass demand and the full biomass demand. Under these scenarios, two Situations namely no increase in cropland by 2010 and increase in cropland by 10% over 1995 area have been considered. The land available for biomass production ranges from 9.6 to 36.5 Mha under the different scenarios. Annually 62-310 Mt of wood could be generated from the surplus land, after meeting all the requirements of biomass, such as domestic fuelwood, industrial wood and sawnwood, with an investment of Rs168-780 billion. An electricity generation potential of 62-310 TWh annually is estimated. The key barriers to produce biomass sustainably for energy are lack of commercial demand for wood for energy, lack of financial incentives, low productivity of plantations, land tenurial barriers and lack of institutions to integrate biomass production for energy and bioenergy utilities. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.