C A R B O N

About the Conference

CARBON is an initiative taken up by the chemical engineering department of RGIPT to gather research personnel from both industry and academia at a common stage to share their knowledge and incubate ideas on fields and interests which can shape the future world. One such subject is the depleting conventional energy sources and the need to supplant them with cleaner and more sustainable forms of energy. This year's theme 'Farm to fuel' associates to one such clean and sustainable alternative, biofuels.

Farm to Fuel

An upsurge in the oil prices and India's energy demand has somehow left India a vulnerable economy, which has led to the severe diversification in the country's energy basket. Most of which, as stated by our honourable minister of Petroleum and natural gas Shri Dharmendra Pradhan, India is planning to fill with non-fossilized fuels such as ethanol, bio-diesel and compressed biogas. This has led to the escalation of R&D in the field, thus paving out ways to include the biofuels as a close to primary source of energy in the country.

Government has already taken several steps in this regard which include:

• The National Policy on Biofuels-2018, which allows production of ethanol from damaged food grains like wheat, broken rice etc. which are unfit for human consumption. The policy also allows conversion of surplus quantities of food grains to ethanol, based on the approval of National Biofuel Coordination Committee. This policy as approved by the Government envisages an indicative target of 20% blending of ethanol in petrol and 5% blending of bio-diesel in diesel by 2030.
• Under EBP programme, ethanol blending in petrol is being undertaken by the Oil Marketing Companies (OMCs) in whole country except island Union Territory (UT) of Andaman Nicobar and Lakshadweep wherein, OMCs blend up to 10 % ethanol in petrol under this programme.
• Further, Government has approved Pradhan Mantri JI-VAN Yojana to provide Viability Gap Funding (VGF) to Second Generation bio-ethanol manufacturing projects to increase availability of ethanol for EBP programme. Under this scheme, foundation stones of several 2G ethanol plants have been laid down such as Foundation stone laying ceremony of IOCL Biofuel project at Gorakhpur was held on 18.09.19, construction had been started at Numaligarh project and its expected date of commissioning is November 2021 and several others.

With 'Farm to Fuel' we expect to take this project and related discussion forward, providing fruitful outcomes, which would help India to reduce its overall dependency on fossilized fuels.