Farmers in India are being encouraged to sell their crop waste rather than burn it to help accelerate progress on curbing fires that spread a deadly, choking smog across key cities.
Smoke from the burning of crop stubble lingers over most of north India for weeks during the cold months of November and December, with air quality deteriorating to hazardous levels in several areas, including the capital, New Delhi.
BiofuelCircle, a start-up based in the western Indian city of Pune, is attempting to connect farmers with companies that can turn the waste into briquettes to be burned in power stations, or ethanol for blending with liquid fuels.
Photo: Reuters
“The environmental issues due to crop residue burning are mainly because of the inefficiency of the supply chain,” BiofuelCircle founder Suhas Baxi said. “The business case for building a stable and reliable supply chain is very solid.”
India wants to convert its 209 million tonnes of annual farm waste and massive piles of kitchen refuse into energy to help reduce fuel imports and improve air quality. If there was sufficient demand and infrastructure, using the country’s entire supply of crop waste for bio-energy could generate as much as IS$50 billion in annual revenue, Baxi said in an interview.
However, progress has been slow. The lack of a reliable supply chain — from timely procurement, to storage, processing plants and finally a market for the products — has meant that farmers continue to burn most of their crop residue.
Barely 20 to 30 percent of farm waste is harnessed, mostly for lower-value products such as briquettes for blending with coal for use in industrial boilers, Baxi said.
“We don’t have the ability to absorb what the farmer is able to give,” he said. “There’s need for mechanization, there’s need for huge storage capacities. There’s investment required in supply chain and that investment will not only solve the problems at hand, but create a bigger opportunity.”
A market for more products including biodiesel, sustainable aviation fuel and compressed biogas is still in its infancy, although there has been some progress. The ethanol percentage of retail gasoline has increased to about 10 percent from just 1.4 percent in 2014, when Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi started his first term in office.
Modi’s government has also been supportive of tackling stubble burning, offering subsidies to buy machinery to gather crop residue and setting mandates for coal plants to use at least 5 percent biomass.
STATE SUBSIDIES: The talks over a factory in Dresden have a top end on par with what Japan is offering TSMC and outdo a cap other firms are being offered in Europe Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s biggest contract chipmaker, is in talks to receive German government subsidies for as much as 50 percent of the costs to build a new semiconductor fab in the country, people familiar with the matter said. The government is in ongoing negotiations with TSMC, as well as its partners on the project — Bosch Ltd, NXP Semiconductors NV and Infineon Technologies AG — the people said, asking not to be identified because the deliberations are private. No final decisions have been made and the final subsidy amount could still change. Any state aid must also
South Korea would avoid capitalizing on China’s ban on a US chipmaker, seeing the move by Beijing as an attempt to drive a wedge between Seoul and Washington, a person familiar with the situation said. The South Korean government would not encourage its memorychip firms to grab market share in China lost by Micron Technology Inc, which has been barred for use in critical industries by Beijing on national security grounds, the person said. China is the biggest market for South Korea semiconductor firms Samsung Electronics Co and SK Hynix Inc and home to some of their factories. Their operations in China
GEOPOLITICAL RISKS: The company has a deep collaboration with TSMC, but it is also open to working with Samsung Electronics Co and Intel Corp, Nvidia’s CEO said Nvidia Corp, the world’s biggest artificial intelligence (AI) GPU supplier, yesterday said that it is diversifying its supply chain partners in order to enhance supply chain resilience amid geopolitical tensions. “All of our supply chain is designed for maximum diversity and redundancy so that we can have resilience. Our company is very big and so we have a lot of customers depending on us. And so our supply chain resilience is very important to us. We manufacture in as many places as we can,” Nvidia founder and chief executive officer Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) said in response to a reporter’s question in
BIG MARKET: As growth in the number of devices and data traffic accelerates, it will not be possible to send everything to the cloud, a Qualcomm executive said Qualcomm Inc is betting the future of artificial intelligence (AI) will require more computing power than what the cloud alone can provide. The world’s largest maker of smartphone processors is transitioning from a communications company into an “intelligent edge computing” firm, Qualcomm senior vice president Alex Katouzian said. The edge in question is the mobile device that a user taps to access a network or service, and Katouzian used his time headlining one of the major keynote events at the Computex show in Taipei to make the case for how big a market that would be. The US company’s chips help smartphones harness
RSS