Friday, December 14, 2007

Mix ethanol with petrol, save money!

Alternative energy

Razen Manandhar
Kathmandu, December 13:

Tired of queuing up for petrol for your vehicles? Imagine of something what nature has given to us and has dual benefits. It relieves us, to some extent, from waiting our turns in petrol pumps and also helps keep our environment clean.

It is more relevant now at a time when the Nepal Oil Corporation has been failing to meet the demand of oil and the rise in price of petrol in international market is going on.

Different plants can be turned into something, which you can add in your fuel tank as much as 10 to 20 per cent, without modifying the engine. It has been in practice in countries like the US, Brazil and Indonesia since a long time.

In our context, if treated properly, waste of sugar mills can produce a liquid named ethanol that can be mixed with petrol to run vehicles. It is cheaper than petrol, provides relief from petrol shortage, helps mange the industrial waste and keeps the environment clean.

“Waste of sugar industries is a source of molasses from which ethanol can be extracted,” said Om Bahadur Shrestha, the team leader of the research on ethanol-pe-trol blend for vehicles. He has recently done a research mixing sugarcane and etha-nol and successfully run eight cars and six motorcycles.

He said the use of ethanol he-lps emit less sm-oke. “If we run our vehicles with 10 per cent of ethanol and 90 per cent of petrol, the emission of the poisonous gas, CO, is reduced to 36.61 per cent,” he added.

As the NOC is not meeting the growing demand of petrol, any company which produces ethanol is going to make profit, he claims, adding that it is also going to provide a new market for sugarcane and create employment for farmers.

He urged the government to make mandatory laws for using etanol in its all vehicles and to cut the demand of oil.

Bhushan Tuladhar, the executive director of ENPHO, said that if all sugar mills start producing ethanol and market it in Nepal, the shortage of petrol will be considerably minimised.

According to him, some sugar mills have already produced ethanol but, since the government has no proper policy to promote it, they have exported the production to India.
[KATHMANDU, DECEMBER 14, 2007, Mangsir 28, 2064 ]