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The government has come out with new guidelines for producing ethanol from sugar and grain-based feedstocks.
These guidelines pertain to the production of ethanol by sugar mills and distilleries from B-Hy, C-Hy molasses, sugarcane juice, sugar and sugar syrup, foodgrains such as maize, broken rice, surplus rice, sourced from Food Corporation of India, etc, and the mechanism to identify the quantity of ethanol produced from these routes, according to the ministry of consumer affairs, food and public distribution which was released recently. According to the new guidelines released on Friday, the validating agencies will have to send a copy of the validation report to the directorate of sugar and vegetable oils, the department of food and public distribution and the ministry of petroleum and natural gas within a fortnight of undertaking the onsite validation. The guidelines issued encompass sugar/molasses-based ethanol distilleries and grain-based distilleries. These norms will help distilleries identify the quantity of ethanol produced from different routes. Anhydrous ethanol for use in automative fuel or as per the requirement of oil marketing companies. As specified in their tender document, the ethanol content percentage by volume shall not be below 99.6 at 15 degrees Celsius. The guidelines said that these distilleries units shall be operated with one type of feedstock at a time. However, in case of ethanol unit having two identifiable processing streams, they may use a different class of feedstock for the two streams subject to proper recording of data of two streams with respect to quantities and qualities. Anhydrous ethanol is one of the biofuels produced today and is a subset of renewable energy. Anhydrous ethanol is commercially produced by either catalytic hydration of ethylene or fermentation of biomass. Any biological material that has sugar, starch or cellulose can be used as biomass for producing anhydrous ethanol. The validating agency shall specify the loss in sugar recovery due to diversion, sugar recovery during the diversion and estimated sugar recovery, considering no diversion of juice/syrup or B H molasses so as to facilitate the calculation of fair and remunerative price (FRP) for sugarcane. (ANI)
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