17.2.09

Praj Industries makes a breakthrough in Ethanol production

The Pune-headquartered Praj Industries, a biofuels technology and solutions company, has achieved a breakthrough in converting lignocelluloses feedstock, such as corn stover, corn cob bagasse and agri waste, into ethanol. It took the company three years of research and 70 scientists to achieve this. It had set up a pilot plant to produce ethanol at its $15 million research and development centre. “The commercial demo plant will be up and running in 2011,” said Pramod Chaudhari, chairman, Praj Industries. “Today, with a breakthrough in cellulosic ethanol technology, Praj enters the league of advanced biofuel-producing countries,” he said. The chairman said the pilot plant had demonstrated the production of ethanol from corn cob and sugarcane bagasse under varying operating conditions. “It has followed proven bench scale process development, for which the company has filed for patents,” Chaudhuri said. With this technology, the company is poised to scale up for non-food biofuels and industrial biotech processes.
Chaudhari said the capacity of the plant was to use two metric tons of bio mass like corn stover, corn cob, sugarcane bagasse, grasses, agri waste and woodchips per day to produce between 250 and 400 kg of ethanol, depending on the moisture. “We will be able to build plants with a capacity of 15,000-30,000 litre of ethanol per day for our clients,” Shashank Inamdar, CEO and managing director, Praj said. The capacity is scalable to 50,000 to 1.2 ml per day, he added. Praj has built turnkey projects of similar capacity for alcohol manufacturing units in 40 countries.
Inamdar said the 450 plants across the globe could be potential customers for the new technology. “Without incurring much investment, we can add on a new cellulosic module to an existing conventional distillery where the basic feedstock is easily available to produce ethanol out of the biomass, including sugarcane leaves,” he said.

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