CII (Confederation of Indian Industry) presented a webinar on ‘Ethanol roadmap for 2025’ on Friday. The webinar was supported by GPS Renewables.
‘Ethanol roadmap for 2025’ webinar highlighted the market opportunity of 1G Ethanol projects to achieve India’s target of 20 per cent ethanol blending with petrol by 2025. The webinar focused on key aspects such as debt financing and feedstock availability challenges, project risks like input, tech and output, technology readiness, and government policies.
Sangeet Singla, Chief Director (Sugar), Department of Food and Public Distribution Director at the Department of Food and Public Distribution announced, “In collaboration with the National Single Window Portal system, we are going to launch a dedicated portal for Ethanol projects. This will be one portal where project proponents can access all the information on one platform.”
“All the existing distillers and new ones must register on the portal www.nsws.gov.in and it will provide information about all the approvals that are required. This will be open from Monday onwards and project proponents can apply for the new window. The new window will last for about six months and we don’t want any non-serious project proponents to apply. If proponents are not able to execute the projects within 1 to 1.5 years then it becomes difficult to achieve our target of 20 per cent ethanol blending by 2025″, he added.
PK Banerjee, Executive Director, SIAM (Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers) said, “ SIAM is completely aligned with the vision of the Government of India. The entire automobile industry is working very closely with the stakeholders to ensure that the milestones defined by the Government of India are met.”
If the annual numbers are taken, around 2.5 crore vehicles are produced every year on an average. Out of this 80 per cent are two wheelers, 15-17 per cent are four wheelers and 3-4 per cent are three wheelers. With this backdrop, we can say that, annually about 70 per cent gasoline is used by two wheelers and 30 per cent gasoline is being used by 4 wheelers.
With the growing number of vehicles added every year, its very clear that higher blends of ethanol usage roadmap is very critical not just from energy security point of view but also for greenhouse gas mitigation, reduction of local pollution, improvement of farmer incomes and as well as the whole Atma Nirbhar Bharat mission.
Anurag Saraogi, CGM, BPCL – Biofuels said, “Ethanol sale is influenced by petrol sales, vehicle profile and the blending mandate in the country. From an offtake point of view Ethanol demand will be driven by the vehicle profile on road. A little bit of disruption is expected from Electric Vehicles but that would largely be offset by the introduction of flex fuel vehicles which can take anything above 20 per cent to the currently talked about 85 per cent of ethanol in the vehicle.”
Indian ethanol mandate is currently at 20 per cent. But there is a big opportunity to go beyond that. For example, in Brazil, the average share of ethanol, because of the flex fuel vehicles, is anything between 46 to 49 per cent of the fuel sales component to petrol driven vehicles. Which means that there is a big opportunity for India to go from 20 per cent to as high as 46 per cent if all the factors are favourable”, he added.
Manju Bolakani, Chief General Manager, SBI said, “We have sanctioned almost 2500 crores worth of projects and there are about 25 units that we have financed. I am sure the figures reported by other banks would also be equally good. It’s a good step that DFPD has been monitoring capacity creation through their portal to ensure that non-serious players are filtered out.”
OMCs have touched 10 per cent blending in a month.
Sridhar Goud, Executive Director, Supplies Operations and Distribution HPCL said, “This is the first time that OMCs have touched 10 per cent ethanol blending in a month. Earlier, when this program was started, there were very few players who were offering ethanol. Mainly from the states of UP, Maharashtra and some portions of Karnataka too.”
The above news was originally posted on www.businessworld.in
