The reported plea by the fertiliser and chemicals ministry to put on hold the Cabinet’s recent decision to increase the level of mandatory mixing of ethanol with petrol seems reasonable and the government should accept it. The country’s total production of ethanol, largely from the by-products of the sugar industry, is inadequate to meet the demand of the chemical industry. Besides, ethanol production also keeps fluctuating in tandem with the production of sugarcane and sugar. Now that the sugar output has been on the downturn since last year, the availability of ethanol has dipped, causing hardships for the industry. Even between 2006 and 2008, when the country reaped a bumper harvest of sugarcane, the sugar industry frequently defaulted on honouring its contracts for the supply of ethanol to the oil marketing companies for 5 per cent doping with petrol. Now that the availability has shrunk further, raising the doping level to 10 per cent is not advisable unless, of course, the government wants to starve the industrial sector of this raw material. Even at the global level, ethanol supplies are tight because Brazil, its largest producer as well as user, has also turned an importer due to reduced domestic sugarcane crops. It has, consequently, not only scaled down its mandatory amount of ethanol mixing into gasoline from 25 per cent to 20 per cent but has also abolished the import duty on ethanol to encourage imports despite high international prices. The Indian chemical industry would find it difficult to source ethanol from the global market as, apart from high prices and tight availability, it carries an import duty of 7.5 per cent.
Indeed, regardless of the current situation, the fact is that the policy of encouraging the use of crop-based biofuels is fundamentally flawed, besides being impractical. For, any biofuel crop would require land and water to grow but both these resources are scarce in India. Sugarcane, in particular, is a high water-consuming crop and needs fertile land to grow. The availability of non-agricultural and non-forest land is limited as reflected in the difficulties faced in acquiring it for industrial, infrastructure and public utility projects. Even the degraded and marginal land cannot be committed for raising biofuel plantations as that would hurt the interests of the poor and the landless who use such land for grazing their cattle. For the same reason, the policy of raising jatropha plantations for producing non-edible oil for blending with diesel, too, doesn’t appear prudent. In any case, not much is known about the technology for growing jatropha plantations, its oil yield and the economics of extraction and processing of its oil, besides the ecological consequences of such plantations. Thus, there is little scope of producing enough biofuel for running vehicles without some way or the other impinging upon food supplies. The clash between biofuels and food security has, in fact, become a global issue. This is more so because several countries, in their misplaced emphasis on biofuels, had begun converting forests into biofuel plantations and diverting cereals into biofuels. The recent spurt in food prices that caused food riots in some countries in 2008 was attributed partly to the growing use of biofuels. What is really needed, therefore, is the emphasis on renewable sources of clean, rather than green, energy.
