BioPower is a young initiative but technologies with enormous impact potential are already emerging from the pipeline.

Sweet sorghum bioethanol technology

Nearly 700 small farmers were engaged in sweet sorghum cultivation during the 2006 rainy season and about 900 small farmers in the post rainy season in Andhra Pradesh, India through collaboration with Rusni Distilleries Ltd. This will be scaled up to 2,000 small farmers in the 2007 rainy season. The distillery has a capacity of producing 30 to 40 kiloliters per day (KLPD) of ethanol for at least 105 days in each of two seasons per annum.

Small-scale farmers within a radius of 40 km from the industry can grow sweet sorghum. We project that farmers will generate about US$ 79 in additional income per year per hectare (over the two rainy and postrainy seasons) from sweet sorghum compared to grain sorghum.

As part of the public-private consortium, Kaveri Seeds is providing high-quality sweet sorghum seeds while ICRISAT provides sweet sorghum breeding research and technical advice on crop management, identification of agro-ecological areas for sweet sorghum cultivation, seed production, partnership-building and capacity-building.

We expect that this pioneering model will be replicated rapidly as awareness spreads, leading to large scale impact. Rainy-season sorghum is currently cultivated in five states in India on about 3.2 million hectares, and we estimate that 60% of this area is suitable for sweet sorghum without irrigation. Where supplemental irrigation is possible, additional areas can be cropped.

Beyond India, five proocessing facilities in The Philippines have recently committed to implementing the model there, and preliminary discussions are underway with firms in Nigeria and Uganda.

Biodiesel technologies

Powerguda, a remote, impoverished tribal hamlet in the Adilabad district of Andhra Pradesh, became an environmental pioneer when it sold the equivalent of 147 tons of carbon dioxide in verified emission reductions as carbon replacements to the World Bank in October 2003. The World Bank paid US $645 to Powerguda women’s self-help groups to neutralize the emissions from air travel and local transport by international participants attending an international conference.

This was the first time the Bank made a direct payment to an Indian village for exporting environmental services. The emission reduction was calculated on the basis of 51 tons of Pongamia oil substituting for petroleum diesel over 10 years from the planting of 4,500 Pongamia trees in 2002.

The carbon income was ploughed back by these landless women into expanding their Pogamia nursery and tree-planting operations. They now raise 20,000 seedlings of Pongamia and Jatropha annually for sale. Most of seedlings are sold to the forest department, but some are also planted on field boundaries, farm bunds and community owned lands. The women are also members of the forest protection committee formed to protect the nearby forest under the government’s Community Forest Management project. The establishment of an oil mill to crush Pongamia seeds into oil has also helped the women increase their incomes, through sale of oil and oilcake.

With support from GTZ (Germany), Southern Online Biotechnologies (SBT) in Nalgonda district of Andhra Pradesh is providing technical support to farmers to undertake biodiesel plantations and to collect biodiesel seeds from existing plantations to provide feedstock for processing by SBT (40 kiloliter per day capacity). SBT assures the price for the seeds and provides the seed cake back to the farmers for improving their soils, and will help them establish their own oil extraction units. The seeds will begin arriving in the current (2007) harvesting season.

Nandan Biomatrix is following a similar model through an agreement with the State Government of Andhra Pradesh to develop 200,000 ha of pro-poor biodiesel plantation, in addition to projects in two other states that should lead to a total of a million hectares by 2010.

Please see the documents below for more details on these impacts.