The Indian government has demonstrated its growing support for the ethanol market, by extending the boundaries for which blended ethanol can be extracted from foodgrains.
Earlier this week, it widened its Ethanol Blended Petrol (EBP) programme to allow fuel to be removed from excess quantities of maize, jawar, bajra, and fruit or vegetable waste, Krishi Jagran revealed.
Until now, the EBP only allowed excess sugarcane production to be converted into bio-ethanol.
A statement from the government, as revealed by the news provider, said: “The National Policy on Biofuels 2018 has empowered the National Biofuel Co-ordination Committee (NBCC) to let conversion of excess quantities of foodgrains for production of ethanol in an agriculture crop year when there is projected oversupply of foodgrains as projected by the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare.”
The NBCC met on November 14th to discuss the topic, ending in the approval of the ethanol production from surplus bajra, maize and jawar for the year 2018/19.
In addition to this, ethanol can also be produced from fruit and vegetable waste as part of the EBP programme.
This will help the government achieve its goal for oil marketing companies to target ten per cent blending of ethanol with petrol over the next three years.
Currently in the UK, only four per cent of road and non-road mobile machinery fuel in 2018 was biofuel.
The government’s latest Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation statistics revealed 525 million litres equivalent of renewable fuel has been supplied over the last nine months, as transport fuel suppliers are now obligated to use some fuel from environmentally-friendly sources.
