India’s plans to divert sugar to ethanol thwarted by short-term policy

In India, rather than divert 2 million metric tons of sugar towards ethanol in response to the government’s deregulation of feedstocks allowing production from ‘B’ heavy molasses and sugarcane juice, mills are only likely to divert a quarter of that volume towards ethanol production. Mills say the reason is because the government only announced prices for ethanol produced from those feedstocks for one year which isn’t enough to justify investment in facilities that can produce ethanol.