Wow! Your car can run on cane juice

NIDHI NATH SRINIVAS

TIMES NEWS NETWORK

NEW DELHI: A day will soon come when our cars will run on cane juice rather than crude oil. Brazil and the US already use over 14bn litres(3.7 Billion Gallons) of ethanol as motor fuel, that beats India’s current total petrol consumption of about 12bn litres(3.2 Billion Gallons).

Conceptually, the 19m tonnes of sugar that we consume each year can instead be converted into 12bn litres of ethanol, says JJ Bhagat, mission director of the Central government’s Sugar Technology Mission.

In a paper titled ‘Energy Security — Issues & Options’, he outlines two cases: one where 350 mt of cane (India’s peak production so far) can be processed entirely into 26bn litres(6.8 Billion Gallons) of ethanol; and the second where the same sugarcane is processed into 18 mt of sugar and 15bn litres(4 Billion Gallons) of ethanol.

“In the future, India may judge energy security to be more important and prefer the use of cane for ethanol over its use to make sugar. In such a case, we can even import the deficit in sugar from the world market, while producing fuel indigenously,” Mr Bhagat suggests.

Ethanol from cane yields eight times as much energy as is needed to produce ethanol, says the Earth Policy Institute, USA.

Driving the switch-over to ethanol is the ‘flex-fuel’ car. Flex-fuel cars can burn petrol or ethanol or any combination of the two. Technologically, a flex-fuel car is essentially a petrol engine car with slight modifications to the fuel pipe and a chip that tells the fuel-injection system what proportion of the fuel flowing into the engine is ethanol.

As this technology has become mainstream, the cost of modifying a petrol-only model to flex-fuel has dropped below $100. This is much less than adapting cars to burn CNG or LPG. Also, ethanol uses the same fuel tank as petrol and mixes easily with petrol.

Around 4m flex-fuel cars are already running in the US. Almost 60% of all new cars sold in Brazil last month came fitted with this capability — up from less than 10% in July ’03. All the leading global car manufacturers offer a range of flex-fuel models in Brazil and the US, and can easily adapt their popular models in other countries across the world.

However, despite these international experiences, Indian progress is pitiful. The petroleum ministry is currently working on just a 5% blend of ethanol and that too, only in nine states. Total consumption of fuel-ethanol will be less than 0.4bn litres this year.

Ethanol required for the first phase of the programme can come from molasses. “However, a really significant biofuel programme will involve diverting part of the cane juice from sugar production to ethanol. This means it should fetch the same economic value as sugar,” says Narendra Murkumbi, MD of Shree Renuka Sugars and a member of the Indian Sugar Mills Association’s task force on ethanol.

“As an industry, we are ready to produce even 3bn litres(800 Million Gallons) a year at short notice by making the necessary investments. Depending on relative demand for sugar and ethanol, we can make between 10(2.6 Gal) and 82 litres(21 Gallons) of ethanol per tonne of cane, with correspondingly reducing quantities of sugar,” says Mr Murkumbi.

“We simply ask the oil companies to blend the mandated percentage of ethanol into petrol without interruption,” he adds.

Ethanol could quickly take off in sugarcane-producing tropical countries, which have the advantage of year-round growing seasons, large labour supplies and low production costs.

As fuel demand rises in these developing nations, biofuel production could check oil imports while bolstering rural economies.