Hi-Tech Agro : Ethanol Industry

Alternate Fuels > Ethanol Industry

Ethanol is an alternate liquid fuel which is mixed with petrol to reduce green house emission. Feed stock for production of ethanol is either grain or molasses. Production of ethanol is energy intensive (thermal) and uses mostly fossil fuel for heat generation. This wide spread use of fossil fuel for generating thermal energy; for producing ethanol intended to reduce green house emission is environmentally not benign. Many countries including USA have mandated to progressively increase biomass to generate thermal energy.

Few thousand million tons of biomass is wasted every year in want of economically sustainable technology for its gainful use. There is no choice now but to use biomass to replace fossil fuel in order to slow down the global warming.

In low density rural and suburban areas of Europe and USA, Pelletising of biomass such as corn cob/stalk, grasses, wheat straw and other stalk along with horticultural residues will need to be decentralized. The transportation to centralized pellet mill in these areas is not environmentally sustainable. The decentralized pellet mill will enable optimal and economical use of biomass as a replacement of fossil fuel. The pellet fuel, thus produced, can then be transported to centralized Biomass storage depot which can supply to industries like ethanol for environmentally sustainable thermal energy production.

Many R & D institutes in USA are working on detailed technology package for establishing large capacity Biomass Depot. Agricultural Utilization Research Institute (AURI) is one such organization working to help the ethanol industry with their energy need.
Traditional high speed ring die pellet mill (used for pelletizing food stock, wood etc) has not been very effective in densifying highly fibrous biomass into pellets. Our innovatively designed slow speed flat die Pellet Mills have become very effective in densification of fibrous biomass material.