Meet Vinod Khosla, ethanol evangelist

PUNE: With his deepset eyes and closely cropped hair - so closely cropped, it looks like a skull cap — Vinod Khosla has the mien of a monk.

The appellation may not be befitting Silicon Valley’s ace ventura, who co-founded Sun Microsystems and later invested bigtime in Google and Amazon - and, in the process, pocketed billions of dollars, but it wouldn’t be out of place either:  Khosla now dons the garb of an evangelist — an ethanol evangelist to be precise.

“At my stage in life, it is important that there is some social purpose to my work,” Khosla demurs. “The world definitely needs it.”

Need what? Conversion to the biofuel. He says ethanol verily is the answer to soaring oil prices and terrorism. Yes, terrorism, too.

“Today, we have a energy crisis. We also have a climate crisis,” he says. “And wrapped up in all this is the dark shadow of terrorism,” the barrel-chested Khosla, wearing a tight-fitting full sleeved tee shirt, expounds.

He’s critical that democracies such as the US and India have to depend on countries such as Saudi Arabia, which are not democracies, for oil.

“We don’t want energy from there,” he says. “Why enter into contracts with unstable governments in Sudan and Nigeria? That’s a shame. We are increasing our import bill. We are forcing the consumers to pay more.”

Instead, Khosla says, India should change the way it is addressing its concerns on energy security. The government and public sector oil refiners should enter into long-term contracts with Brazil, the world’s leading manufacturer of ethanol.

The Centre should also mandate automobile companies to make vehicles that are compatible with ethanol. “It takes very little money to make cars adaptable to ethanol fuel,” he says. Also, import duties and taxes on ethanol should be the same as for oil. “There should be a level playing field. Consumers would benefit the most.”

Ethanol can be made from both sugar cane and sweet sorghum. The latter requires less water than the former, and can be grown even during the lean season on less arable land. Advances in cellulosic technologies will enable converting sweet sorghum, which looks like sugarcane, to squeeze out 5-6 times more ethanol than sugarcane, Khosla says.

Planting sweet sorghum looks to be, well a sweet idea.

“We expect it to happen in the next 2 to 3 years. When that happens, we’ll be set for a big explosion.”

For Pramod Chaudhari, the Praj Industries chairman sitting next to him on Wednesday afternoon, that must have sounded like a Mozart piano sonata in C major.
Apart from making equipment for sugar mills, Praj is also manufacturing equipment for ethanol manufacturing.

Just in May this year, Khosla invested about Rs 100 crore in the company based in Pune, where he was born to an army household, for a 10% stake.

Khosla champions the cause of ethanol in California, US, too, where he resides.

In November, the state will hold a referendum that will decide whether the government should mandate the use of ethanol.

“It’s not very often that we see a new market opening. It would be worth hundreds of billions of dollars if we can replace petroleum.”

But there are discordant noises around the world against alternate fuels. Most of them are fuelled by big business with sizeable interests in oil.

There’s an argument that farms that grew foodgrains would shift to growing plants for the manufacture of ethanol and bio-diesel. For Khosla, this is all palaver.

“The future work is on research. And Praj Industries definitely has an opportunity to become the world leader in all this.” He says a day would come when, just like in computer software, the world will beat a path to India’s doors, to set up R&D facilities to do research on alternative fuels.