15 more ethanol plants to be set up: Bihar CM Nitish Kumar
PATNA: Chief minister Nitish Kumar on Thursday inaugurated the state’s second ethanol plant at Motipur in Muzaffarpur district. The plant has the capacity to produce 110 kilolitre of ethanol per day from maize. It has been developed with an expenditure of Rs 152 crore.
The plant is expected to provide employment to at least 700 people.
Nitish had inaugurated India’s first ethanol plant at Purnia in May last year.
Altogether 17 ethanol-producing units have been approved in Bihar, including one in Purnia with a capacity of 65,000 litre per day.
Speaking at the event at Motipur, Nitish said works are in progress on 15 more ethanol plants at different places in the state, including Bhojpur and Gopalganj.
“We made a policy in 2007 to make ethanol from sugar cane and proposals worth Rs 31,000 crore had come to us, but the then central government did not accept it.
The Centre said that it was more essential to process sugar cane to produce sugar, rather than ethanol. We got to know in 2020 that the central government was making a policy on ethanol production. Thus, I met the Prime Minister and briefed him about all the steps taken by us since 2007 for setting up ethanol plants in Bihar,” Nitish said.
Bihar government had launched Ethanol Production Promotion Policy in Marc 2021, making it the first state in the country to have its own ethanol promotion policy under National Policy of Biofuels, 2018. The state ethanol policy has allows extraction of ethanol from surplus quantities of maize, which was earlier limitec only to sugar cane. “We have communicated to the Centre that ethanol can be produced utilising sugar cane, maize, and broken rice. We invited proposals for setting up ethanol plants in Bihar and got a whopping 152 proposals. However, central government approved only 17 such plants. Works are going on at a rapic pace for setting up ethanol plants at 15 more places in the state,” Nitish said.
According to sources, an ethanol plant at Ara with a capacity of 5 lakh litres per day is ready for inauguration. It will be the second largest ethanol plant in Ana.
Besides, works are going on for commissioning o vo plants each in Gopalgan and Nalanda districts and one plant at Bhagalpur.
