In what is being hailed as a major step towards going green in the developing world, Bharat Renewable Energy, a joint venture between Bharat Petroleum Corporation and Nandan Biomatrix, announced they will build 10 new biodiesel refineries in India.

Jatropha Field in Uttar Pradesh

Considering that green initiatives are few and far in-between in this part of the world, the announcement has already assumed great significance. The $428 million project will initially be concentrated around the Kanpur, Jhansi, Laltpur, Chitrakoot, and Sultanpur districts of Uttar Pradesh.

According to the sources in the country, the nation wants biofuel to account for 20% of its total gasoline fuel production. While that is still a long way to go, the company will use jatropha as the main source of raw material and promises that the newly added plants will contribute 270 million gallons of biofuel by 2015. And what’s even better, the production will not affect the food crops, as the plant is a common weed easily found in the region.

We can only hope that nations like India and China are really taking steps in the green direction, as both nations contribute plenty in terms of global carbon emissions each year.

[via TreeHugger]

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“Tactical Biorefineries” is what they call these new portable generators roughly the size a small moving van that weighs about 4 tons and turn trash into electricity. They’ve been mainly designed for the U.S. military and could be used outside the military shortly after, when the technology evolves (translated: “when they want to”) in the future.

The biorefineries are designed to use multiple types of garbage at once; first it has to separate organic foods from residual trash (paper, plastics, etc). Food waste is sent to a bioreactor and ferments into ethanol while the residual materials are used in a gasifier and turned into low-grade propane gas and methane. But wait, that’s not all because the propane and methane are also being used in a modified diesel engine that powers the generator which produces electricity.

“At any place with a fair amount of food and scrap waste the biorefinery could help reduce electricity costs, and you might even be able to produce some surplus energy to put back on the electrical grid,” said Michael Ladisch, the professor of agricultural and biological engineering at Purdue University who leads the project.

The first unit (it costs $1 million)  has been tested in November and the results have been great. Though it works on diesel fuel for a few hours until the gasifier and the bioreactor begin to produce fuel it produced 90 percent more than it consumed.

I’ll have to agree it’s a great piece of technology and lots of places could use one.