India's Jindal Steel and Power plans to build a commercial scale fuel ethanol plant at one of its steel mills using LanzaTech's gas fermentation technology, the New Zealand company said in a statement Friday.
Jindal Steel will work jointly with Indian Oil Corporation on this venture, which will offtake all the fuel ethanol produced at the plant and use it for gasoline blending, the statement said.
Jindal Steel is the third steel mill to adopt LanzaTech's technology after South Korea's Posco and China's Baosteel.
The technology uses non-food renewable resources to produce ethanol and 2,3-butanediol, a key building block used to make polymers, plastics and hydrocarbon fuels. Jindal Steel's planned facility will process waste gases from its steel mill.
The announcement was made during the state visit to India by New Zealand's Prime Minister John Key, Trade Minister Tim Groses and Vice President of Business Development in Asia Pacific, Prabhakar Nair.
Nair said that LanzaTech's goals in India were to help the industry mitigate greenhouse gas emissions and in meeting the Indian government's criterion that new sources of renewable energy do not come compete for food or water resources.
India's crude oil imports are expected to exceed 80% of its fuel consumption in the next few years and the government has a national biofuels policy to increase the use of renewable fuels produced from sustainable, non-food sources, the statement said.
Jindal Steel and Power is setting up two 6 million mt/year steel plants in Orissa and Jharkhand. Currently, the company has an integrated steel plant at Raigarh in Chhattisgarh with a capacity of about 3 million mt/year.
