All aboard

It’s perhaps rather fitting that biofuels in India have so far been spurred on more by trains than by motor vehicles. For unlike in the US and Europe, it was the Indian railway that first saw the potential of replacing conventional fuel with biofuels.

Also unlike in the US and Europe, this embrace of biofuels was not primarily driven by concerns over the security of the fuel supply or the environmental impact of conventional fuels, but by sheer necessity.

In 2002, Indian Railways, the state-owned train operating company, was virtually bankrupt. In part, this was because of its huge diesel bills and so it started to explore cost-effective ways to replace conventional diesel with biodiesel.

In particular, researchers from Indian Railways looked at the possibility of producing biodiesel from jatropha, a hardy shrub with oil-rich seeds that grows wild in India. Without extensive heating, jatropha oil is poisonous and so isn’t much used as a foodstuff, but the researchers found that it makes a handy biodiesel feedstock.

Today, Indian Railways can produce around 1,000 litres of biodiesel a day at its own biodiesel plant in Perambur, utilising a feedstock that includes oil from jatropha plants that grow alongside train tracks and used cooking oil from hotels and restaurants. This is sufficient to replace around 10% of the conventional diesel in many of its locomotives.

With recent funding of $1.6 million from the National Railway Board, Indian Railways now plans to cultivate a whole lot more jatropha shrubs and to establish a network of biodiesel plants with a total production capacity of 53,000 gallons a year.

And where Indian Railways has led, the Indian government has followed. In 2003, it established a ‘National Mission on Biodiesel’, with the ultimate goal for biodiesel to meet 20% of India’s diesel requirements by 2011–12.

The first part of this mission ran until 2007. This looked to cultivate a total of 400,000 hectares of jatropha, with a yield of just under 4 tonnes of oilseed per hectare per year. The second part will run from 2007 to 2012 and will focus on encouraging the creation of a commercial biodiesel industry.

This mission has not gone entirely smoothly. For a start, Indian farmers did not immediately embrace jatropha, because of concerns over exactly how lucrative such a crop would be. Especially as it usually takes at least three years for jatropha shrubs to establish themselves and produce their first crop of oil-rich seeds.

Nevertheless, around 350,000 hectares are currently being developed as jatropha plantations and the first Indian companies to produce biodiesel from jatropha oil commercially have begun to spring up. These include Naturol, Tree Oils India and Southern Online Bio Technologies (which rather bizarrely is both a biodiesel producer and an internet service provider, hence the all-encompassing name), all of which are based in the state of Andhra Pradesh.

In parallel to this mission, the Indian government has been setting mandates for the percentage contribution that biofuels should make to conventional fuel supplies. In 2007, it set the mandate at 5%; increasing it to 10% in 2008. Then in September 2008, the government announced a new National Biofuel Policy, which proposed raising the mandate to 20% by 2017.

Under this new biofuel policy, the focus will continue to be on encouraging the domestic production of biodiesel from feedstocks such as jatropha. This is despite the fact that India is currently the world’s fourth largest producer of ethanol, which is produced by the fermentation of molasses, a by-product of sugar manufacture. Most of this ethanol is not currently produced for biofuel purposes, as the Indian liquid fuel market is dominated by diesel. Instead, it is mainly used by the chemical and alcoholic drink industries.

That could soon change, however, as the Indian Sugar Mills Association is now actively promoting the use of ethanol as a biofuel. Meanwhile, the Indian biofuel technology company Praj Industries is currently building India’s first cellulosic ethanol biorefinery, which will use the sugar-rich grass known as sweet sorghum as its main feedstock. 

The views represented here are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of John Wiley and Sons, Ltd. or of the SCI.