Uttranchal has provided India a new bio-fuel for industry

Uttranchal has probably given India a new bio-fuel to be used in place of coal, a highly polluting fossil fuel, and also provide additional income to the locals.

Updated on: Jun 27, 2010, 17:10:18 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Uttranchal has probably given India a new bio-fuel to be used in place of coal, a highly polluting fossil fuel, and also provide additional income to the locals.

The source of the new bio-fuel are pine needles that fall on ground during summer months and are a cause of forest fires because of high concentration of resin in them.

In a bid to prevent fires, the forest department initiated a pilot project in Chamoli district where local companies bought pine needles collected by village women at a rate of rupee one per kilogram. “On an average a village woman earned Rs 70 a day this year,” said Anil Baluni, vice-chairperson of state’s environment advisory committee, who supervised the project in Chamoli district.

Initially, the department thought that pine needles can be used as a fuel switch directly but it did not work because of presence of different nitrogen oxides. It was then the department initiated an experiment to burn collected pine needles in a closed kiln so that nitrogen compounds can evaporate through hydrolysis.

“The half burnt material are then mixed with cow dung or clay and briquettes are made with the help of machines,” said A Samant, state’s Chief Conservator of Forests. These bricks are then sold to local coal based industries.

Fifty 50 tonnes of pine needle bricks can replace 30 tonnes of coal, at half the price of the latter, and would mean saving 71 tonnes of carbon emissions, the department officials said.

In the first year itself, the government has found private players to run the project. “They have set up collection centers for pine needles and kilns to make bricks,” Baluni said. For each tonne of needles collected, the private player is required to pay the government a royalty of Rs 20 per tonne.

Samant said thousands of tonnes have been collected from 18 forest divisions since April when the project started and bricks are being made to provide local industry the fuel for rest of the year.

Baluni said that another indication of the project has worked is five companies submitting proposals to Uttranchal government to set up 10 MW power plants based on fuel from pine needle bricks. “The proposals are under consideration,” he said.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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