Pine needles replace coal in Uttarakhand

Uttarakhand has developed a new bio-fuel that is used in place of coal, a highly polluting fossil fuel, and provides additional income to locals.

Updated on: Jun 28, 2010, 01:58:04 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Uttarakhand has developed a new bio-fuel that is used in place of coal, a highly polluting fossil fuel, and provides additional income to locals.

The source of the bio-fuel is pine needles, which fall on ground during summer and cause forest fires because of the high concentration of resin in them.

In a bid to prevent the fires, the forest department initiated a pilot project in Chamoli district where local companies bought pine needles collected by village women at Re 1 per kg.

"On an average, a village woman earned Rs 70 a day this year," said Anil Baluni, vice-chairperson of the state’s environment advisory team, who supervised the project in Chamoli.

Initially, the department tried using pine needles as fuel directly, but it did not work due to the presence of different nitrogen oxides. The department then experimented with burning the pine needles in a closed kiln so that nitrogen compounds could evaporate through hydrolysis.

"The half-burnt material is mixed with cow dung or clay and briquettes are made with the help of machines," said A. Samant, the state’s chief conservator of forests. These bricks are sold to local coal-based industries.

Fifty tonnes of pine needle bricks can replace 30 tonnes of coal at half the price of coal. This saves 71 tonnes of carbon emission, the department officials said.

The government found private players to run the project from the first year. "They have set up collection centres 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.

Baluni said another indication the project had worked was that five companies had submitted proposals to the Uttarakhand government to set up 10MW power plants based on fuel from pine needle bricks.

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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