Tata Chemicals, leading manufacturer of caustic soda and fertilisers in the country, said today that it had bought a 35 per cent stake in JOil Pte, a Singapore-based jatropha seedling company. The stake buy will help the firm gain exclusive marketing rights for technology to develop the best seed varieties of the plant, which yields biodiesel.
The Mumbai-based company has committed to invest Rs 80 crore in lieu of the stake in the next four years. Bio-diesel is one of the many alternatives being developed globally to achieve energy security. According to Tata Chemicals, the break-even price for jatropha-used biodiesel is $55-$60. The price of crude oil is currently hovering around $52 a barrel after dropping almost 65 per cent from its all-time high of $145 a barrel in July.
“No one is expecting crude to remain at this level,” said Homi R Khusrokhan, managing director, Tata Chemicals. “We have made the investment keeping 2-3 years in mind, when we expect crude oil to trade at $100 a barrel,” he said.
JOil, a joint venture of Temasek Life Sciences Laboratory and other investors, has developed the technology to produce seedlings, which gives standarised yield and consistent output from jatropha. Currently, the jatropha plant used for commercial production has an irregular pattern of production. “We will have an exclusive global marketing right to the research done by Temasek Life Science Laboratory,” said Khusrokhan.
The company will be setting up a tissue culture lab to study the commercial potential of the project and it will take at least a year before it is brought to the market.