Current Work

My research revolves around the sustainability assessment of the advanced (2G) biofuel value chains to transition from fossil fuels in the Indian transport sector. Despite the abundant availability of biomass in remote and rural areas and Municipal Solid Waste in the urban areas, the advanced biofuel industry is still in its nascent stages. Policies have promised various financial incentives, including Viability Gap Funding (VGF), subsidies, and off-take guarantees, but to little effect. With a current mixing of 9.99%, India's Ethanol Blending Program (EBP) is well on track to achieve the blending targets of 20% by 2025. However, the entire ethanol is produced using first-generation sources, including b-heavy and c-heavy molasses, corn, and surplus grains from the Food Corporation of India (NITI AAYOG, 2021). First-generation biofuels have been successful over their second-generation counterparts largely due to constraints in technology maturity, conversion costs, and feedstock availability for the latter. Notably, the advanced biofuel policies benefit the energy companies more than the other stakeholders along the value chain, whose aspirations are often overlooked. The advanced biofuel value chain could be broadly divided into upstream (biomass supply), conversion (biorefinery), and downstream (biofuel supply) processes. Thus, the large-scale integration of biofuels can potentially boost the Agro-Industry-Energy economy and benefit all the stakeholders involved in the whole value chain- farmers, farm labourers, biomass logistics services, energy industries, and biofuel logistics. External value chains like the oil & gas industry, conventional production plants (fossil hydrogen and methanol, 1G ethanol), vehicle manufacturing, and other local industries utilising biomass residues also affect the penetration of advanced biofuels.

The broad objective of the research is to explore the feasibility of achieving the second-generation biofuel transition by examining and optimizing the economic, environmental, and social performance along the value chain. The specific objectives of the research are: (i) To develop the sustainability assessment framework (dimensions, indicators, etc.) for the biofuel value-chain; (ii) To apply the above framework to perform the sustainability assessment of different biomass types and conversion pathways to second-generation biofuels; (iii) To develop multiple scenarios of biofuel integrations, and estimate the implications for sustainability, oil import dependency, and GHG mitigation; (iv) To provide inputs for policy and planning to support large-scale biofuel transition in the Indian transport sector.

The novel contributions of this research are as follows:

• A holistic observation of the entire advanced biofuel value chain and identifying the economic, environmental, and social impacts of the transition on the internal and external stakeholders.

• Identifying the effects of uncertainties in feedstock availability on the overall sustainability of the biofuel transition

• An assessment framework for quantifying the impacts at all stages of the biofuel transition.