Sanjay Jog / Mumbai April 8, 2010, 0:24 IST

Ethanol manufacturers have welcomed the Empowered Group of Ministers

The biofuel industry is finding it tough to remain in business, with both government pricing and raw material availability working against them.

The government, on its part, has launched a massive programme to develop high-yielding varieties of jatropha, a plant that can grow in wastelands across India, to meet the severe raw material shortage for the green fuel industry.

INDIA

Bengaluru, March 14: A chemical engineer from the city is on a mission to promote the use of green energy. Avinash Narayanaswamy, chemical engineer and postgraduate in sustainable energy technology from the University of Twente in Netherlands, will drive 17,000 km from London to Mongolia in a vehicle run entirely on bio-fuel derived out of waste vegetable oil.

'A quantum of 135 million litre ethanol is being produced from six sugar factories of the State annually. This is being used with petrol as a fuel. There is a target of increasing the use of ethenal to 10 per cent in the State by the end of next year,' said State Bio-fuel Task Force President Y B Ramakrishna.

Any policy on blending ethanol with petrol has to keep in mind the costs involved in ethanol production - excessive use of scarce water to grow sugarcane and the effluents discharged in the process.

Rakesh BhartiaRakesh Bhartia
CEO, India Glycols

Apart from reducing feedstock for the chemicals industry, there are environment costs of the bio-fuel policy that are quite significant

Applauding the Jawaharlal Nehru Solar Mission 2022 initiative launched by India to unleash 20,000 MW of power during the next decade, US-based Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has expressed its strong desire to be associated with the Indian Government, industry and academia to research and develop clean energy green technology in the post-Copenhagen scenario.

Committing scarce resources like water, land is a bad idea