Meet Vinod Khosla, ethanol evangelist
The following interview with Vinod Khosla, co-founder of Sun Microsystems and prolific billionaire dotcom investor, appeared in DNAindia. Interestingly, he calls for the establishment of new geopolitical relations based on green energy and democracy, two concepts that, to him, are narrowly intertwined.
Pune, India - With his deepset eyes and closely cropped hair Vinod Khosla has the mien of a monk. The appellation may not be befitting Silicon Valley’s ace ventura, who co-founded Sun Microsystems and later invested bigtime in Google and Amazon - and, in the process, pocketed billions of dollars, but it wouldn’t be out of place either: Khosla now dons the garb of an evangelist — an ethanol evangelist to be precise.
"At my stage in life, it is important that there is some social purpose to my work," Khosla demurs. "The world definitely needs it."
Terrorism, climate change, energy crisis
Need what? Conversion to the biofuel. He says ethanol verily is the answer to soaring oil prices and terrorism. Yes, terrorism, too. "Today, we have a energy crisis. We also have a climate crisis," he says. "And wrapped up in all this is the dark shadow of terrorism," the barrel-chested Khosla, wearing a tight-fitting full sleeved tee shirt, expounds.
He’s critical that democracies such as the US and India have to depend on countries such as Saudi Arabia, which are not democracies, for oil. "We don’t want energy from there," he says. "Why enter into contracts with unstable governments in Sudan and Nigeria? That’s a shame. We are increasing our import bill. We are forcing the consumers to pay more."
Instead, Khosla says, India should change the way it is addressing its concerns on energy security. The government and public sector oil refiners should enter into long-term contracts with Brazil, the world’s leading producer of ethanol.
The Centre should also mandate automobile companies to make vehicles that are compatible with ethanol. "It takes very little money to make cars adaptable to ethanol fuel," he says. Also, import duties and taxes on ethanol should be the same as for oil. "There should be a level playing field. Consumers would benefit the most."
Sweet sorghum, a sweet idea
Ethanol can be made from both sugar cane and sweet sorghum. The latter requires less water than the former, and can be grown even during the lean season on less arable land. Advances in cellulosic technologies will enable converting sweet sorghum, which looks like sugarcane, to squeeze out 5-6 times more ethanol than sugarcane, Khosla says:
ethanol :: biodiesel :: biomass :: bioenergy :: biofuels :: energy :: sustainability :: cellulosic :: Khosla ::
Planting sweet sorghum looks to be, well a sweet idea. "We expect it to happen in the next 2 to 3 years. When that happens, we’ll be set for a big explosion."
For Pramod Chaudhari, the Praj Industries chairman sitting next to him on Wednesday afternoon, that must have sounded like a Mozart piano sonata in C major. Apart from making equipment for sugar mills, Praj is also manufacturing equipment for ethanol manufacturing.
Just in May this year, Khosla invested about Rs 100 crore (€17mio/US$21.7mio) in the company based in Pune, where he was born to an army household, for a 10% stake. Khosla champions the cause of ethanol in California, US, too, where he resides.
In November, the state will hold a referendum that will decide whether the government should mandate the use of ethanol. "It’s not very often that we see a new market opening. It would be worth hundreds of billions of dollars if we can replace petroleum."
But there are discordant noises around the world against alternate fuels. Most of them are fuelled by big business with sizeable interests in oil. There’s an argument that farms that grew foodgrains would shift to growing plants for the manufacture of ethanol and bio-diesel. For Khosla, this is all palaver.
"The future work is on research. And Praj Industries definitely has an opportunity to become the world leader in all this." He says a day would come when, just like in computer software, the world will beat a path to India's doors, to set up R&D facilities to do research on alternative fuels.
Copyright DNAIndia, 2006.
Article continues
Pune, India - With his deepset eyes and closely cropped hair Vinod Khosla has the mien of a monk. The appellation may not be befitting Silicon Valley’s ace ventura, who co-founded Sun Microsystems and later invested bigtime in Google and Amazon - and, in the process, pocketed billions of dollars, but it wouldn’t be out of place either: Khosla now dons the garb of an evangelist — an ethanol evangelist to be precise.
"At my stage in life, it is important that there is some social purpose to my work," Khosla demurs. "The world definitely needs it."
Terrorism, climate change, energy crisis
Need what? Conversion to the biofuel. He says ethanol verily is the answer to soaring oil prices and terrorism. Yes, terrorism, too. "Today, we have a energy crisis. We also have a climate crisis," he says. "And wrapped up in all this is the dark shadow of terrorism," the barrel-chested Khosla, wearing a tight-fitting full sleeved tee shirt, expounds.
He’s critical that democracies such as the US and India have to depend on countries such as Saudi Arabia, which are not democracies, for oil. "We don’t want energy from there," he says. "Why enter into contracts with unstable governments in Sudan and Nigeria? That’s a shame. We are increasing our import bill. We are forcing the consumers to pay more."
Instead, Khosla says, India should change the way it is addressing its concerns on energy security. The government and public sector oil refiners should enter into long-term contracts with Brazil, the world’s leading producer of ethanol.
The Centre should also mandate automobile companies to make vehicles that are compatible with ethanol. "It takes very little money to make cars adaptable to ethanol fuel," he says. Also, import duties and taxes on ethanol should be the same as for oil. "There should be a level playing field. Consumers would benefit the most."
Sweet sorghum, a sweet idea
Ethanol can be made from both sugar cane and sweet sorghum. The latter requires less water than the former, and can be grown even during the lean season on less arable land. Advances in cellulosic technologies will enable converting sweet sorghum, which looks like sugarcane, to squeeze out 5-6 times more ethanol than sugarcane, Khosla says:
ethanol :: biodiesel :: biomass :: bioenergy :: biofuels :: energy :: sustainability :: cellulosic :: Khosla ::
Planting sweet sorghum looks to be, well a sweet idea. "We expect it to happen in the next 2 to 3 years. When that happens, we’ll be set for a big explosion."
For Pramod Chaudhari, the Praj Industries chairman sitting next to him on Wednesday afternoon, that must have sounded like a Mozart piano sonata in C major. Apart from making equipment for sugar mills, Praj is also manufacturing equipment for ethanol manufacturing.
Just in May this year, Khosla invested about Rs 100 crore (€17mio/US$21.7mio) in the company based in Pune, where he was born to an army household, for a 10% stake. Khosla champions the cause of ethanol in California, US, too, where he resides.
In November, the state will hold a referendum that will decide whether the government should mandate the use of ethanol. "It’s not very often that we see a new market opening. It would be worth hundreds of billions of dollars if we can replace petroleum."
But there are discordant noises around the world against alternate fuels. Most of them are fuelled by big business with sizeable interests in oil. There’s an argument that farms that grew foodgrains would shift to growing plants for the manufacture of ethanol and bio-diesel. For Khosla, this is all palaver.
"The future work is on research. And Praj Industries definitely has an opportunity to become the world leader in all this." He says a day would come when, just like in computer software, the world will beat a path to India's doors, to set up R&D facilities to do research on alternative fuels.
Copyright DNAIndia, 2006.
Article continues
Wednesday, September 06, 2006
News about tropical energy crops
We think it might be useful to offer news about those crops in a separate category (which can be found in the right bar of this blog). We will report about these crops with headlines on advances in biotechnology, green chemistry, agronomic news, biofuel programs, the expansion of hectarages, production data, breakthroughs in bioconversion processes using these crops, trade deals, export data and much more.
The following plants were selected, mainly because (we think) they will become the major energy crops of the future:
- Cassava (Manihot esculenta), also known as 'manioc'; a promising bioenergy crop which thrives in non-forest areas and which is relatively drought-tolerant. Cassava is a staple food for half a billion people, mainly in Africa and South East Asia.
- Jatropha (Jatropha curcas), known under many different names ('pinhao manso' in the lusophone world, 'tuba tuba' in South East Asia, or 'noix de pourghère' in the francophone world). Known for its tolerance to droughts, yields a good oil for biodiesel, and features in many national biofuels programs as the preferred crop.
- Oil palm (Elaeis guineensis), yielding more energy than any other crop (oil and solid biomass), and currently more competitive than any other crop. The expansion of oil palm plantations poses numerous environmental problems though.
- Sorghum, a family of drought-tolerant grass species the most interesting of which is sweet sorghum (Sorghum bicolor), already used widely for the production of alcohols. Sorghum is the fifth most widely grown food crop on earth, and is especially interesting because it is widely cultivated in semi-arid regions of Africa (the Sahel and the Southern African desert zone).
- Sugarcane, perhaps the best known biofuel crop, with Brazil's vast ethanol industry which is based on it, being the example for many countries. There is a lot of scientific research going on focusing on sugarcane, with developing countries playing a crucial role. It will be interesting to see how this crop expands further into the global South, now that Brazil has shown how to build a bio-economy around it.
- The market for solid biofuels is expanding rapidly, and globally. That is why we include information about 'tropical tree crops'. Some countries are already importing this kind of woody biomass from the south, to be used as a feedstock for biomass power plants, or to be co-fired with coal. We have limited ourselves to gathering news about the most promising tropical tree species, namely: eucalyptus, acacia and rubberwood.
- Finally, with the advent of second generation biofuels, more and more grass species are being identified as having great potential as feedstocks to be used under various 'biomass-to-liquid' conversion technologies (cellulosic ethanol, fast pyrolysis, gasification-to-liquids). Strictly speaking both sugarcane and sorghum are grasses, but in this category, we focus on herbaceous species that are only gradually being recognized as potential bioenergy crops and around which a great deal of research is going on: miscanthus and bamboo (genuses with many species and subspecies).
There already is a wealth of information about these crops available online. For this reason we will limit ourselves to reporting stories that may count as real 'news'. However, mainstream media do not often report about crops and their development, and certainly not about those cultivated in the tropics, which is why we will actively search for stories and studies coming from research institutions dedicated to these particular crops [entry ends here].cassava :: jatropha :: oil palm :: sorghum :: sugarcane :: eucalyptus :: acacia :: rubberwood :: bamboo :: miscanthus ::
Article continues
posted by Biopact team at 6:16 PM 0 comments links to this post