Watch: Can India’s Ethanol Blending Target Create A Food-Fuel Conflict?
India aims to reach 20% blending of petrol with ethanol by 2025, but that needs produce from farmland equivalent to Bihar’s gross cropped area
Lakhimpur Kheri, Uttar Pradesh: In 2003, India started blending fuel with ethanol, meant to reduce carbon emissions on combustion. By June 2022, the country achieved 10% blending levels, depending largely on sugarcane for ethanol production under the Ethanol Blended Petrol (EBP) programme.
India is the world’s second-largest sugarcane producer, and has been consistently generating more sugar than it consumes. But estimates show that to meet the 20% target that the government has set for 2025, the country needs over 10.2 billion liters of ethanol annually.
This entails moving beyond sugar and sugarcane--leading to a growing dependence on maize, broken rice and rice procured from Food Corporation of India, in the following years. This requires producing 11–12 million tonnes of grains that is maize and rice, 275 million tonnes of sugarcane, and 7.1 million hectares of land. This means land equal to gross crop area of Bihar.
Experts say deploying high-yielding varieties can help, but that also means a heavier reliance on water, pesticides and fertilisers.
The E20 target will not reduce emissions drastically, may be detrimental to India’s food security and will only help us inch towards energy security, IndiaSpend reported in May 2022.
Further, increasing production of food-based feedstock for ethanol manufacturing may not be the best use of land in a hungry country, a report by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) contended. For example, you need 187 hectares worth of maize-derived ethanol to match the annual travel distance of an electric vehicle recharged from one hectare of solar energy--even accounting for losses from electricity transmission, battery charging and grid storage, stated the IEEFA report.
Note: This story is produced with support from Internews Earth Journalism Network (EJN).
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