India looking to sweet sorghum, as ethanol now beats petrol
According to the Financial Express ethanol in India has become price competitive for blending with petrol as the price of crude oil has skyrocketted recently (but has meanwhile come down substantially). According to the newspaper, this dispels the myth that massive subsidies are needed to augment usage of the bio-fuel in the country. This is the case even after adjusting for energy-equivalence (1 liter of petrol has the same energy content as 1.5 liter of ethanol).
India is targetting a 10% blend of ethanol in its national petrol supply, William D Dar, director general of International Crops Research Institute for Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), said. According to Dar, the constraint is not the cost of ethanol production but the supply of raw materials. This is where ICRISAT and partners have stepped in.
Sweet sweet sorghum
Sweet sorghum (earlier post) is gradually being identified as a more promising biofuel crop than sugar cane. ICRISAT headquarters in Patancheru in Andhra Pradesh, has formed a public-private partnership with Rusni Distilleries (P) Ltd. Rusni ensures that seeds of the highest-sugar sorghum varieties identified by ICRISAT and India's National Research Centre for Sorghum reach farmers so that they can increase their productivity. Rusni also helps farmers by transporting the stalks from farms within a 30-km radius of the plant, and providing more distant farmers with technologies to crush the stalks and reduce the juice into syrup that can be moved cost-efficiently to the ethanol production plant. "Lessons we are learning from this partnership will enable the technology to scale up faster and more widely in the coming years.”
Most bio-ethanol in India is produced from the molasses left over from the refining of sugar from sugarcane, but the supply of molasses is insufficient and not reliable enough for costly ethanol production facilities:
ethanol :: biodiesel :: biomass :: bioenergy :: biofuels :: energy :: sustainability :: sorghum :: India ::
The facilities need to keep working round-the-clock to pay off. But sweet varieties of sorghum store large quantities of energy as sugar in their stalks, while also producing reasonable grain yields. Sorghum, like sugarcane and maize, exhibits C4 metabolism, making it more efficient at converting atmospheric carbon dioxide into sugar than most plants. As a dryland crop, sorghum requires far less water than costly irrigated sugarcane, making it more accessible to the poor.
The juice squeezed out of sweet sorghum stalks contains about 15%-20% sugar that can be fermented into ethanol more cheaply than from sugarcane molasses, and with even greater energy savings compared to maize grain. Prior to that, maize grain has to be hydrated and converted from starch to sugar.
India is targetting a 10% blend of ethanol in its national petrol supply, William D Dar, director general of International Crops Research Institute for Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), said. According to Dar, the constraint is not the cost of ethanol production but the supply of raw materials. This is where ICRISAT and partners have stepped in.
Sweet sweet sorghum
Sweet sorghum (earlier post) is gradually being identified as a more promising biofuel crop than sugar cane. ICRISAT headquarters in Patancheru in Andhra Pradesh, has formed a public-private partnership with Rusni Distilleries (P) Ltd. Rusni ensures that seeds of the highest-sugar sorghum varieties identified by ICRISAT and India's National Research Centre for Sorghum reach farmers so that they can increase their productivity. Rusni also helps farmers by transporting the stalks from farms within a 30-km radius of the plant, and providing more distant farmers with technologies to crush the stalks and reduce the juice into syrup that can be moved cost-efficiently to the ethanol production plant. "Lessons we are learning from this partnership will enable the technology to scale up faster and more widely in the coming years.”
Most bio-ethanol in India is produced from the molasses left over from the refining of sugar from sugarcane, but the supply of molasses is insufficient and not reliable enough for costly ethanol production facilities:
ethanol :: biodiesel :: biomass :: bioenergy :: biofuels :: energy :: sustainability :: sorghum :: India ::
The facilities need to keep working round-the-clock to pay off. But sweet varieties of sorghum store large quantities of energy as sugar in their stalks, while also producing reasonable grain yields. Sorghum, like sugarcane and maize, exhibits C4 metabolism, making it more efficient at converting atmospheric carbon dioxide into sugar than most plants. As a dryland crop, sorghum requires far less water than costly irrigated sugarcane, making it more accessible to the poor.
The juice squeezed out of sweet sorghum stalks contains about 15%-20% sugar that can be fermented into ethanol more cheaply than from sugarcane molasses, and with even greater energy savings compared to maize grain. Prior to that, maize grain has to be hydrated and converted from starch to sugar.
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