Good on paper

Making ethanol from food products can increase stress

The scheme approved by the Union Cabinet to boost the production and use of ethanol for blending with petrol has pros and cons which need to be weighed judiciously before its implementation. It envisages a 6 per cent interest subvention to put up ethanol distilleries or expand the existing ones to raise the installed ethanol production capacity to 17.5 billion litres by galvanising an investment of Rs 40,000 crore. This would facilitate raising the ethanol blending of petrol to 20 per cent, from the present less than 10 per cent, by 2025, far ahead of the target date of 2030. This objective, prima facie, is a good one because it can help restrain vehicular emission and reduce oil imports.

But there is a potential downside as well, the most worrisome being the kind of feedstock the scheme has proposed to produce additional alcohol. They include mass-consumed staple food and feed grains such as rice, wheat, maize, barley, and sorghum, and other crops like sugar beet and sweet sorghum, besides sugarcane, sugar syrup, and, notably, finished sugar. In fact, of about 14 billion litres of stipulated additional ethanol, about half is sought to be made from food, feed, and other crops. Their cultivation requires land and water, both limited natural resources, besides costly inputs. The rest of the ethanol is proposed to be made from sugarcane and its products, including cane juice and sugar, instead of the by-products of sugar manufacturing, such as molasses and bagasse, as is the case now. Though, at present, the country has surplus stocks of both cereals and sugar, which can be gainfully utilised for making ethanol, such bonanza does not last forever. A single drought can wipe out the surplus. It does not, therefore, seem prudent to commit large quantities of foodgrains and sugar for biofuel production. A land- and water-stressed country like India, where malnutrition, or hidden hunger, is rampant, can ill-afford to do that.

In fact, most countries that had started diverting food and feed crops to biofuels as part of their climate change mitigation action have begun to retract their moves after realising its impact on the availability and prices of foodgrains. Only a few countries that have surplus land and water, notably the US and Brazil, continue to produce significant amounts of biofuels from cereals (mainly corn) and vegetable oils (soybean and palm oil). The European Union has decided to phase out biofuels with a high risk of direct or indirect alteration in land use by 2030. The Renewable Energy Directive (RED-II), adopted in 2018, sets a limit of 7 per cent on food- and feed crop-based biofuel.

India, indeed, has all the more reason to avoid committing land and water for biofuel production and, instead, look for other biomass for this purpose. Fortunately, huge amounts of such biomass are generated every year by crops and animals, agro-processing industries, forests, agro-forestry, and wastelands, which can be the potential raw material for making ethanol and other forms of bioenergy. Technology is also now available for converting agricultural waste and cellulosic biomass into biofuel. The use of these materials for biofuel can be incentivised even under the newly sanctioned scheme. That would perhaps be a better way to clean the environment and reduce the oil import bill.