“There is a plan that has been put in motion to ensure that the 18,000 buses under the KSRTC will be shifted from fossil fuel to biodiesel with diesel or a higher mix of ethanol with diesel by end of next year,” said Bio-fuel Task Force, Chairman, Y B Ramakrishna here on Friday.
Currently, the KSRTC and BMTC are running 500 of their buses on bio-diesel blended with diesel, while the State Transport Corporation, in a separate initiative, has been running 1500 buses on a mixture of 7.7 percent ethanol with diesel.
Ramakrishna said KSRTC was in fact saving upto Rs 3.5 crore on fuel consumption under the pilot project.
“Performance wise, KSRTC has found that the mix of Biodiesel with diesel and the 7.7 percent addition of Ethanol with diesel has given them at least five miles more on the same amount of fuel,” the chairman said.
In a recent meeting held with the Indian Oil Corporation and other PSU Oil companies, the task force decided to upgrade the mix of ethanol to 10 percent from the current mix of 5 percent in fuel, in the State by October 2009. “We will try and push the project by August first week to ensure that it will be carried out all over the State,” said Ramakrishna.
Oil seed cultivation
The task force has identified 6,400 hectares of “degraded government land” in the rain fed areas of eastern districts in the State for oil seed cultivation.
Out of these, the task force has envisioned that 3,100 hectares of forest degraded land will be covered by bio fuel plantation activities.
The project will involve 96 villages forest committees (VFC’s) under the National Rural Employment Guaratnee Scheme. The remaining 3,300 hectares land will be covered by bio-fuel species with the involvement of 52 village forest committees under special development projects.