Financial Daily from THE HINDU group of publications
Thursday, Mar 27, 2003
Financial Daily from THE HINDU group of publications Thursday, Mar 27, 2003 |
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Corporate
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Alliances & Joint Ventures Brazil's Dedini ties up with Uttam Group for fuel alcohol tech Our Bureau
NEW DELHI, March 26 AFTER Alfa Laval and Delta-T, it is the turn of the $250-million Dedini Industrias de Base to eye the country's potentially lucrative anhydrous alcohol (the high purity ethanol used for blending with petrol) market. The Brazilian engineering major, which is the world's largest supplier of alcohol distillation plants, has tied-up with the Rs 225-crore Ghaziabad-based Uttam Group to offer domestic sugar mills `flexible technologies and complete turnkey solutions' for manufacture of fuel alcohol. "Brazil is today the world's biggest producer of fuel alcohol, with its annual output of 12.3 billion litres exceeding even that of the US (eight billion litre). And 85 per cent of Brazil's ethanol production is based on Dedini's technology," said Mr Rajan Adlakha, Director, Uttam Sucrotech Ltd. Dedini has, since 1946, supplied, erected and commissioned nearly 350 anhydrous alcohol distilleries world-wide with capacities ranging from as low as 10,000 litres per day (LPD) to 3,00,000 LPD. "Unlike others, they are an established player and not a new entrant to this segment. Further, their technologies are based on manufacture of alcohol from sugarcane, as is the case in India, and not beet, which is the usual source in the US or Europe," Mr Adlakha said. He added that sugar mills would be given the flexibility to manufacture anhydrous alcohol not just from molasses, but also from secondary cane juice or even cane syrup. "Mills now utilise the entire cane juice available after crushing to produce sugar. What we are proposing that they use only the high recovery primary juice for producing sugar and use the secondary juice directly for manufacture of alcohol," he pointed out. Anhydrous alcohol differs from industrial or potable alcohol in view of its high purity level of up to 99.8 per cent and moisture content of just 1,000-2,000 parts per million (ppm). On the other hand, ordinary rectified spirit contains only 95 per cent alcohol, the balance being water and various trace impurities. While rectified spirit is produced through simple binary distillation, manufacture of fuel alcohol, however, involves more complex processing technologies. "We can offer mills both the conventional azeotropic distillation technology or the more advanced, molecular sieve dehydration process for manufacturing anhydrous alcohol. If a mill is currently operating on low pressure boilers, it would probably make more sense for it to go in for azeotropic distillation," Mr Adlakha noted. The Uttam group is one of the country's leading manufacturers and supplier of sugar plant and machinery, which includes boiling house equipment, continuous centrifugal machines and complete cane milling, sugar drying, grading and handling systems. In January 2000, the group set up its own sugar mill in Roorke (Uttaranchal) with capacity to crush 3,500 tonnes of cane per day (tcd), which has been subsequently expanded to 5,000 tcd.
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