As the price of crude oil continues to shoot into the stratosphere, blending ethanol into petrol has become an urgent priority for India’s petroleum refiners. So far, only five percent blends have been sold in the 13 states and three Union territories under the government’s EBP (ethanol blending programme) mandate because of the restricted availability of fuel ethanol.
A new tender for 100 crore litres is stuck on the issue of price, with domestic suppliers understandably inclined towards the far more remunerative markets for potable consumption and chemical production. As a result, IndianOil Corporation, Bharat Petroleum and Hindustan Petroleum & Co are looking at the possibility of setting up their own captive capacity for the brew.
Almost all ethanol produced in India comes from molasses, a by-product of sugar manufacture, and consequently suffers from the price-inelasticity that arises from government-controlled pricing of sugarcane. Given their desperate finances, the oil refiners are dead serious about taking control of at least this one input, even if they can do nothing about the price of crude they import or that at which they are compelled to sell the fuels they produce.
IndianOil will shortly start research into second-generation bioethanol produced from cellulosic biomass, which is available in abundance in the form of farm or municipal wastes. The company is setting up a research pilot at its R&D headquarters in Faridabad to study the viability of 2G bioethanol production using a diversity of feedstocks ranging from wheat and rice straw and husk to bagasse and timber residues to waste paper.
The technology, developed by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) of the US, will hit commercial scale in the US (using corn stalks) later this year. The plant was built by Pune-based Texol, which specialises in designing and engineering pilot equipment for the petroleum and chemical industries that customers typically use to study the effects of variable inputs and parameters on the efficiency of their overall process.
The fully computer-controlled and -monitored plant is designed for a choice of pre-treatment reactions (using acid, alkali, or aqueous ammonium hydroxide, for example, depending on the feedstock) and simulates a wide range of operating conditions. It’s the seventh pilot plant Texol has delivered to IOC since 2008, including one in July 2009 for batch conversion of straight vegetable oil into biodiesel using a catalyst IOC had developed itself. (That study proved that the process being investigated was unviable.)
In June 2010 Texol commissioned the first completely automated gas-to-liquids (GTL) plant in the country for Bharat Petroleum’s corporate R&D centre in Noida, which wanted to study the high-pressure Fischer-Tropsch reaction for the continuous synthesis of diesel fuel from natural gas. In October last year it set up a twin-column slurry reactor for Engineers India in Gurgaon, which is using it for hydrodynamic studies of the gas flow in the slurry columns.
Together, all three companies (BPCL, EIL, Texol) plan to combine the two pilots and scale them up “by 150 times”, Texol director Ashutosh Pande told this correspondent. In like manner, the cellulosic ethanol plant will now be offered to the market by Texol in consortium with NREL and IOC. In fact, the three companies hosted a very interested team from HPCL at Texol’s Pune factory for a detailed demo before the pilot plant was knocked down and shipped to IOC in Faridabad.
Pande sees GTL as a thrust area for the petroleum industry in India and Texol, which started business in 2005 with a hydroprocessing pilot plant for Petronas Malaysia, is positioning itself to capitalise on this. In addition, it is seeing growing interest in its plate reformer technology for the generation of hydrogen out of methanol, not only from the petroleum and petrochemical industries. Methanol reformers are a vital component of hydrogen fuel-cell-powered vehicles because they eliminate the hazards of storing and delivering pressurised hydrogen.
Texol developed its first methanol reformer for the Naval Material Research Laboratory in 2007 and this, incidentally, was the first project it did for a defence client. At the DefExpo a couple of years back the company demonstrated a Reva electric car fitted with a fuel cell fed by a reformer it had designed itself. That vehicle, Pande said, was “tested and tried” to the satisfaction of the agency that had commissioned Texol for the job.
Going one step further, the company is hard at work on the second generation of a portable energy-generating device that combines a reformer and a fuel cell and fits into a backpack. It recently commercialised an oxygen generator module based on a technology developed by BARC that involves the decomposition of water using sodium borohydride.
Designed for the generation of oxygen in enclosed spaces such as emergency shelters and submarines, the module can also be used as a hydrogen generator in a petroleum refinery environment. The only one of its kind from an Indian supplier,it is, Pande promises, a very cost-effective replacement for the imports that are at present the only available alternative these critical applications.
ELIOT LOBO