Ethanol – A Solution to Pakistan’s Power Woes

By Umer Khayyam and Tehzeeb Bano (The Express Tribune) ... Carbon dioxide/greenhouse gas emissions, generated from the burning of fossil fuels, are increasing in Third World societies like Pakistan.

To negate the negative atmospheric results of non-renewable energy sources, global and regional societies have to look for infinite and less harmful energy sources, like biofuel and importantly, to facilitate the transport sector in restricting carbon emissions.

It is inexhaustible, cleaner consuming substance, which is safe to deal with and can be transported easily with reduced outflow of dangerous substances. The three widely used biofuels are ethanol, biodiesel and biogas.

Since long, Pakistan’s economy has experienced incremental shortages in fuel, so the deficit is overcome by imports. Yet, as a long-term solution, it is important to increase national-level power generation through alternative energy sources.

As an agricultural economy, there are huge prospects of producing power from ethanol, following the Brazilian model. Biofuel is an ecological-friendly fuel and an assessment done by the Ministry of Agriculture demonstrates the capability of producing biofuel, most importantly by the sugarcane industry.

Here, again the potential energy generation from biofuel could not be completely recognised in light of the fact that sugarcane yield remains below the global average.

In order to meet the clean energy demand, Pakistan has designed its first biogas plant in light of the imported Chinese design. Pakistan Council of Renewable Energy Technologies adopted biogas technology and installed 21 family-measure units.

However, due to multiple reasons like absence of craftsmanship, gas pressure factors, spillage and hurdles in the way of good execution of the gas delivered through fermentation procedure, the council suspended the programme.

On the other side, India introduced the programme with few modifications, which was suitable to local conditions, and successfully managed 1,200 family-size biogas plants. A project of installing 2,500 biogas plants was launched in 2007 in India and the subsidy component was Rs17,000 per plant.

Returning to the point, regardless of the financial constraints in the energy sector of Pakistan, 2,000 biogas plants have been installed successfully in previous years and work on 500 more plants is under way.

Initially, the biogas units were built for cooking and home-use purposes. Biogas production can be enhanced with the help of animal dung which can run 3.825 million small biogas units for feeding 50 million people.

Substituting gasoline with bioethanol could result in considerable foreign exchange savings, importantly under the government’s initiative to subsidise biofuel production through exemption from customs duty. As a consequence, the biodiesel refinery has been built in Karachi, which is capable of processing 18,000 tons of biofuels per year.

Nevertheless, for sustained supply of cleaner energy from biofuels, there is a dire need to cultivate crops and cover the unused land with grass to meet the national energy demand. Also, there is an immediate need for a comprehensive national policy that should be well incorporated into regional policies and plans to support cleaner energy projects.

There is also a dire need for legislation for exemption from customs duty, sales tax and income tax on imported plants, machine innovation and hardware for sustainable power generation projects. As a special focus, the technology, apparatus and particular objects used in the production of biodiesel have been exempted from taxes. READ MORE