Bamboo from the verdant hills of the North-East could soon fire up cars on our roads. A biofuel refinery, the first-of-its-kind in India, is being set up at the Numaligarh Refinery (NRL) in Assam, which will soon process biofuel from bamboo, abundantly found in the region.
The project, a ?-1,000 crore joint venture between NRL and Finnish company Chempolis Oy, was signed in October 2014. On Monday, a team from the refinery will leave for Finland to acquire the technology.
Speaking to dna, NRL secretary Hemanta Kumar Sarmah said that the project will turn biomass from non-food crops, primarily bamboo, into ethanol. “Bamboo will be cut into smaller chips for easier transportation and storage, and then we would apply a process to turn it into biofuel. The new refinery will have the capacity to process 49,000 tonnes of ethanol yearly," said Sarmah. The refinery is expected to be operational in two years.
The three-member team that NRL is sending to Finland on Monday will study Chempolis Oy's patented method, named formicobio, which extracts ethanol and biofuel from non-food crops.
Last October, NRL signed an MoU with the Arunachal Pradesh Bamboo Resources Development Agency (APBRDA) to procure 3 lakh tonnes of bamboo annually. The refinery also signed an MoU with the Nagaland Bamboo Development Agency (NBDA) to procure 2 lakh tonnes of bamboo in December last year.
Assam chief minister Sarbananda Sonowal, who has already written to the Centre for a subsidy of ?10,000 crore for a ?20,000-crore upgradation of NRL, said: "This is a project with huge potential. Mizoram has been consciously planting bamboo for a while now. In Assam, Karbi Anglong and Dima Hasao areas are thick with bamboo trees. If harnessed well, this project will lead to rapid development in the region."
The programme is significant, given that, as per the 2009 national policy on biofuel, petrol and diesel must mandatorily be mixed with 10% ethanol and there are talks that it might be increased to 20% soon.
