Issue 19, 2013 - Balliol College - University of Oxford

Biofuels in India
By george hArris (2008)
A couple of months later i entered a world of
fraught traffic, short tempers and endless delays
in the uK, and then embarked on a threemonth
internship with indian oil’s research
and development centre on the outskirts
of Delhi, with a vague remit to analyse the
feasibility of biofuels in india.
Biofuels have divided opinion among
scientists and politicians: are they a short- term
solution to global fuel emissions that is ideal for
rural development, or a cause of burgeoning
food prices and an aggravator of the droughts
that have damaged rural communities and
even led to an increase in greenhouse gas
emissions Biofuels grown from edible crops
are particularly controversial and have been
implicated in food shortages and food price
rises, and lambasted as uneconomical without
heavy subsidies.
india is understandably on a quest for
energy security. Currently, over 80 per cent of
its crude oil requirements are met by imports.
A limited indigenous supply capacity means
that this percentage will rise steadily alongside
population and GDP. Diesel and to a lesser
extent petrol account for most of the country’s
petroleum-product consumption, and with this
in mind india has set a 2017 target to reach a 20
per cent blend of biofuel in both fuels.
this represents a considerable challenge in
a country with almost all its potential fertile
land already under cultivation and 20 per cent
of its population undernourished. in such an
environment displacing food crops for energy
crops would be politically unpopular and
ethically questionable. Along with a heavily
diesel-dependent economy, these factors rule
out mimicking biofuels programmes in Brazil
and America.
the country has seen modest success in
the conversion of molasses (a by-product
of india’s vast sugar industry) into ethanol.
But production capacity is limited, and as
demand for petro-fuels increases, any impact
that molasses-sourced ethanol can make
diminishes. instead, hope has been placed on
jatropha (Jatropha curcas), an oil-seed-bearing
tree that produces oil suitable for blending
with diesel. studies of jatropha suggested
promising growth on wastelands, of which
india probably has around 20 million hectares.
A successful programme, it was argued, could
produce biodiesel at the same cost as petrodiesel,
reclaim vast swathes of wasteland, and
‘Do you think you would be able to cope with
the heat and the Indian monsoon’ A strange
question for a job interview. I replied that any
weather must be better than the cold, wet English
summer we were having, and that I’d been to a
few hot countries before. How different could
India be
alleviate rural poverty. Accordingly, the indian
government targeted a 20 per cent blend of
jatropha-sourced biodiesel in all commercial
diesel by mid-2012. several months on from
that deadline, the production of commercial
biodiesel is negligible, largely because of
cripplingly low seed yields from the jatropha
plant and weak implementation of policy.
the conclusions i reached after reviewing
the available information were relatively
simple: pump resources into R&D and don’t
pursue large- scale biodiesel plantations until
it has been shown that crops are viable on
wastelands in an indian climate. Meanwhile,
focus on efficiency improvements for the
molasses-to-ethanol process and adopt a
technology-neutral approach to future biofuel
processes such as algal biodiesel and lingocellulosic
ethanol.
While writing the technical report
i submitted to indian oil, i spent
my weekdays trawling through
government reports and
academic papers with
my sagacious
supervisor,
Dr tuli. At
weekends i had
the opportunity
to explore
Delhi. it is impossible to encapsulate such a
fantastically complex and rich city in this brief
article, if at all, although William Dalrymple’s
City of Djinns is a fabulous introduction. of
my Delhi experiences Qawwali (a form of
sufi music prominent on the subcontinent)
perhaps made the greatest impression. i spent
many happy evenings with friends in old Delhi
listening to the famous Delhi Qawwals ululate
into the dusk, reciting poetry, sometimes
improvised, with a backing of trance-inducing
harmoniums and tablas. in a city hugely
stratified by wealth, religion and caste, Qawwali
was a rare pleasure enjoyed by people right
across the social spectrum.
thanks to Balliol and its bursary scheme,
i had a memorable and stimulating internship
with indian oil. As for the monsoon, it never
fully arrived in Delhi that summer. several
times a savage black sky threatened, but only
once did rain fall with any kind of ferocity.
An ill omen for the biofuel crops of 2012, but a
decent excuse to go back for the full experience!
istockphoto.com/harvepino
issue no.19 MAY 2013
15