BS Reporter / Chennai/ Mysore Sep 09, 2009, 00:37 IST
One of the three 20,000 litre per day bio-diesel plants the Indian Railways are planning to set up, is likely to be located at Yelahanka, near Bangalore, and may become functional by the middle of next year.
Indian Railways and Emami Ltd, manufacturers of personnel care products, are looking at Karnataka to meet their bio-diesel requirements, Karnataka State Biofuel Task Force chairman Y B Ramakrishna said in Mysore.
Speaking to the press after visiting the R&D facilities of Labland, which has been working on Jatropha since 2001 and has applied for five patents, he said, apart from the Indian Railways and Emami, the Karnataka State Road Transport Corporation (KSRTC) would expand bio-diesel coverage to all its 18,000 fleet of buses by next year. Proceeding on a pioneering and aggressive path in using bio-diesel, KSRTC has been using ethanol blended bio-fuel since 2002 and was presently using it in 5,500 buses at 7.7 per cent blend. Continuing its aggressive path, the “role model corporation of the country” would switch over its entire fleet of 18,000 buses to bio-diesel and add to its savings the carbon credit earnings also. Its savings would be around Rs 22 crore including the carbon credit earnings.
Indian Railways, the biggest consumer of diesel in the world, proposed three bio-diesel plants of capacity 20,000 litres a day at three centres, for blending diesel with biofuel. It was looking at Karnataka, apart from Gujarat, where entrepreneurs could set up the biofuel plants with financial backing from the Railways. Some entrepreneurs had evinced interest and said money was not the issue for them but needed assurance that the Railways would lift all the 20,000 litres of biodiesel produced in their plants.
“The Task Force, therefore, is arranging a dialogue between the Railways and the entrepreneurs by the end of this month,” Ramakrishna said adding that the first plant may be set up at Yelahanka and should become operational by the middle of next year.
Setting itself on a big expansion mode, Emami was looking at Karnataka and Tamil Nadu for Rs 300 crore investment. Aiming at 1,500 litres of edible and 300 litres of bio-diesel oil per day, partially with imported seeds, they were looking for lands near an airport, he said and added, “We are positive of convincing them on locating their unit in the state. Karnataka had done pioneering work in bio-fuels since 1994-85 and was already producing enough quantities of bio-fuel seeds, 4.75 lakh tonnes per year. The emphasis was not on just Jatropha but included multiple crops and the Task Force was exploring short gestation crops. The “Hasiru Honnu” (green gold) project targetted a lakh hectares in three years and so far 6,400 hectares had been covered. A meeting of the district heads on September 24 was convened to aggressively pursue the project, the Chairman said, lauding the work done at Labland.
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