Troubled Times for Tata: a Biofuels Digest special report on India

by Biofuels Digest correspondent Joelle Brink

The commissioning of Tata Chemicals’ new sweet sorghum ethanol plant in Nanded, Maharashtra later this month will be one of the bright spots amid troubled times in India’s financial sector and for the $30 billion Tata Group, the nation’s oldest and most respected industrial conglomerate.

Earlier this week, Tata came to the rescue of AIG policy holders to protect the nation’s banking system and bought Citibank’s Indian back office operations, preserving thousands of jobs. At the same time the Tatas have had  their own problems, most notably being forced to move their new 500,000 unit Nano plant all the way across country to Gujarat due to irreconcilable conflicts between the ruling Communist Party of West Bengal and the Trinamool Congress party led by Mamta Bannerjee. For the present, the Nano is being assembled in an existing Tata plant in Pune and will be ready for its official launch later this month.

The new Tata Chemicals facility in Nanded will be the nation’s first pure sweet sorghum ethanol plant. The designer/builder is Vikram Khosla-backed Praj Industries, a longtime proponent of sweet sorghum as a sustainable ethanol feedstock. The plant will scale up to a maximum capacity of 8 million litres per year by 2010, but at initial scale during the pilot phase, it will produce 30kl a day.

Praj Industries has built sweet sorghum ethanol production plants in other countries and is enthusiastic about the future of sweet sorghum as a sustainable feedstock. “It has the characteristics of grain sorghum and sugarcane, with the stalk containing non-crystalline sugar that can be converted into ethanol”, says Abhay Chaudhari, Executive Vice President of the company. Tata Chemicals is a member of ICRISAT’s Sweet Sorghum Ethanol Research Consortium (SSERC) and will plant a new ICRISAT hybrid that produces high levels of sugar in the roots as well as the stalk of the plant.

The new ethanol plant will generate its own power from milled stock, and will have a state of the art wastewater treatment system designed to meet the specific challenges of sweet sorghum processing. Tata Chemicals also has plans to make use of the by-products of its ethanol business using research from its Innovation Centre in Pune.

Praj said Tata plans a crushing capacity of 900 tons of sweet sorghum stalks per day and will cultivate the feedstock on 4,000 hectares of land. “We are sort of entering the business and are nowhere near national scale,” said Homi Khusrokhan, managing director of Tata Chemicals. The current lack of high quality feedstock and insufficient research on social and environmental impact are the main problems to be worked through in the pilot stage.

Free Subscription to the Daily Biofuels Digest e-newsletter

Related Stories

India ministerial group approves National Bio-Fuel Policy; avoids key decisions on biodiesel, jatropha support

In India, agriculture minister Sharad Pawar announced that a ministerial group supervising energy policy has approved the National Bio-fuel Policy, including the formation of a National Bio-fuel Coord...

Part two of a special Biofuels Digest report on technology behind the $2500 Tata car

From Biofuels Digest correspondent Joelle Brink, part two of a special report on Tata: When it debuted earlier this year at the Detroit Auto Show, Tata Motors’ mighty mini was hailed by the ...

India gets serious about cellulosic ethanol: Special Biofuels Digest report

By Joelle Brink, special to Biofuels Digest India is finally getting serious about the government’s commitment to cellulosic ethanol and other biomass fuels, and nothing shows this better than t...

India’s Tata acquires 35 percent of JOil for $16 million; will assume marketing role for jatropha seedlings

In India, Tata Chemicals announced that it would acquire a 35 percent stake in JOil, a jatropha company, for buys 35% in Singapore’s JOil for $16.5 million. The deal will give Tata exclusive marketi...

Special Biofuels Digest Report on the new $2500 Tata car

From Biofuels Digest correspondent Joelle Brink Every now and then a social revolution comes along disguised as a small car. Call it the Model T, the Volkswagen Beetle, the Citroen 2 CV, the Fiat 8...

Tata Chemicals to build 3 Mgy sweet sorghum plant in Maharashtra, India

In India, Tata Chemicals will establish a sweet sorghum-based ethanol plant in Nanded, Maharashtra with an initial capacity of 3 Mgy....