The Assam Bio Ethanol Pvt Ltd (ABEPL) is targeting to join hands with more than 30,000 farmers over the next three years to source bamboo for the world’s only second-generation bioethanol plant, a senior official said.
The ₹4,930-crore plant, with an installed production capacity of 49,000 million tonnes per annum (MTPA), was inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi in September last year, and is presently undergoing stabilisation with limited raw material resources.
“Presently, we are going through the start-up phase. Within around next week, we should be able to stabilise the plant. Thereafter, we will go for full-scale production,” ABEPL Chief Executive Officer Rupjyoti Hazarika told PTI in an interview.
Located at Numaligarh in Assam’s Golaghat district, the unit is the only commercial second-generation bioethanol plant in the world using bamboo as the raw material. All other first-generation ethanol plants use food crops such as sugarcane or maize as biomass.
Besides ethanol, the plant will also annually produce 19,000 tonnes of furfural, 11,000 tonnes of acetic acid, 32,000 tonnes of liquid CO2 and 25 MW of green power.
“During the trial run, we produced fuel-grade ethanol with 99.7 per cent purity. The normal range is to have a 99.5 per cent purity level,” he said.
To fully achieve the installed ethanol output, the 43-acre plant will require five lakh MTPA of green bamboo as raw material.
The CEO said that to achieve its targeted raw material sourcing, 12,500 hectares of bamboo plantation will be required, using 60 lakh saplings over the next three years.
“We have so far registered over 4,200 farmers for sourcing bamboo. We are targeting more than 30,000 farmers across a 300-km radius sourcing zone over the next three years,” he added.
He said that the company has so far transferred ₹2.4 crore to farmers’ accounts for sourcing bamboo without involving any middleman.
“We have set a target to source bamboo from a 300-km radius of the plant. We will take green bamboo from 16 districts in Assam, four in Arunachal Pradesh, five in Nagaland and one in Meghalaya,” Hazarika said.
Presently, bamboo cultivation is taking place on 300 hectares of land with the already registered farmers, he added.
“We have freely distributed one lakh saplings, the majority of which are for institutional players like tea gardens,” Hazarika said.
With the government allowing five per cent of tea garden land for non-tea purposes, many owners have expressed willingness to use their land for bamboo cultivation, he added.
“We are identifying non-crop land and not encouraging farmers to convert agricultural land for bamboo cultivation. We are looking for barren and unused land for bamboo cultivation,” he said.
Hazarika also said that when the company sources bamboo from 12,500 hectares of land, ABEPL will become a carbon neutral entity.
For producing ethanol, bamboo is chopped into small chips of 25 mm each. Although there are many varieties of bamboo available in the Northeast, no specific type is required for the fuel’s production.
“We have identified 24 chipping units across four districts in the first phase. Of those, we have signed agreements with eight and four have already started supplying bamboo chips,” the CEO said.
He said that at the full-scale operation, ABEPL will be the largest consumer of bamboo in the Northeast.
The world’s first second-generation bio-ethanol plant is a ‘zero-waste’ facility, which will utilise all parts of the bamboo and is estimated to give a ₹200-crore boost to the rural economy in the state.
The ABEPL is a joint venture company promoted by state-run Numaligarh Refinery Ltd (NRL), and Finland-based Fortum 3 BV and Chempolis Oy.
