Dalmia Bharat Sugar and Industries plans to increase its ethanol manufacturing capacity to 15 crore litres per annum by next January from eight crore litres currently.

The move is in line with the government’s decision to raise ethanol blending in auto fuels to 20 per cent by 2025 from about eight per cent.

With this capacity expansion, Dalmia Bharat Sugar will divert about 1.50 lakh tonne of sugar for ethanol production compared to 60,000 tonne now. The expansion will happen at the company’s Jawaharpur, Nigohi and Kolhapur plants. One new distillery will be set up at Ramgarh.

The company believes that the recent announcement by the Central government to advance an ethanol blending programme of 20 per cent to 2025 will benefit both the country and the sugar manufacturers.

The move will allow the industry to cut carbon emissions and reduce the outflow of foreign exchange as crude oil imports will come down. Alongside, as the government cannot provide subsidies on sugar exports after 2023 due to WTO norms, the sugar manufacturers will now be able to divert that sugar for ethanol purposes, it said.

The advancement of the ethanol blending programme means that in the next four to five years, the industry will be able to balance its output with consumption, which will translate into reasonable prices for the sweetener and keep inventory under control.

In the current sugar season, Dalmia Bharat Sugar has exported 66 kmt of sugar till May-end against 192 kmt logged in the same period last year.

Dalmia Bharat Sugar has three sugar factories located in Uttar Pradesh (Ramgarh, Jawaharpur and Nigohi) and two in Maharashtra (Kolhapur and Sangli). As of now, the company has aggregate sugarcane crushing capacity of 34,000 tonnes of cane crush per day, distillery and co-generation operation of 240 klpd and 119 MW respectively.

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