New Delhi: India could introduce a mandatory blending requirement for isobutanol with diesel as early as this year, Ministry of Road Transport and Highways (MoRTH) Secretary V Umashankar said on Friday, flagging the move as a key lever for energy security and decarbonisation of the road transport sector.
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Speaking at the CII Multimodal Transportation and Logistics Summit, Umashankar covered a range of policy initiatives — from higher ethanol blending and hydrogen logistics to barrier-less tolling and electric heavy-duty vehicles.
Bharat Petroleum is already conducting strategic research on blending isobutanol with diesel, and Umashankar said early results were promising. "Blending of diesel has been looked into with great seriousness. Bharat Petroleum is already undertaking strategic research for isobutanol blending with diesel. And the results are very encouraging. It is quite likely that the blending mandate will start coming in somewhere later this year," he said.
The secretary underscored the significance of diesel blending given the fuel's scale of consumption. Since diesel demand is nearly twice that of petrol, he said, blending mandates for diesel would have a proportionately larger impact on India's energy security than equivalent measures applied to petrol.
India has already hit a 20 percent ethanol blend in petrol, using ethanol derived from feedstocks such as sugarcane, corn and rice. MoRTH is now pushing the envelope further, having issued a draft notification covering vehicle manufacturing requirements for E85 — a blend of 85 percent ethanol with petrol — and E100, which would allow vehicles to run on near-pure ethanol.
"There have been some concerns about blending at the lower level (E20), but here it is a little different because the vehicle is manufactured differently. It will have a separate (fuel) dispenser also at the petrol pumps for dispensing E85 or E100 fuel, unlike normally blended petrol, which is done through a common dispenser," Umashankar said.
The ministry has also proposed amendments to vehicle emission rules to broaden the scope for higher ethanol blends and alternative fuels, opening the door for flex-fuel and pure biofuel vehicles across all vehicle categories.
MoRTH is also working on a draft notification for truck-trailer interchangeability, a move Umashankar said would address a key bottleneck in building the charging and battery-swapping infrastructure required for electric heavy-duty commercial vehicles.
"If you have to look at battery swapping, then there will have to be several points which will have to be provided with this kind of infrastructure for swapping to happen. If you look at battery charging, then it is going to take a good amount of time for the charging to happen. So, does the truck lie idle at that point in time? So, what we are looking at is what we call a tractor-trailer interchangeability," he said.
On hydrogen-powered logistics, Umashankar said pilot results had been encouraging on costs, with the exception of refuelling infrastructure. "The results are very good. The key cost is comparable with respect to other forms of logistics travel. It's not high. The only high-cost element is the hydrogen refuelling stations. And presently in the pilot projects, government support (is) being provided," he said.
Hydrogen buses have also been introduced on public transport routes between Delhi and Faridabad and Delhi and Noida. On the freight side, hydrogen-powered vehicles are capable of travelling 450 km on a single fill, which Umashankar said made a corridor like Delhi-Mumbai viable with as few as three refuelling stations along the route.
Multi-Lane Free Flow (MLFF) tolling — which allows vehicles to pass through toll plazas without stopping or slowing — has already been deployed at two locations and is working well, Umashankar said. A third plaza is expected to go live within 8-10 days.
"We plan to expand this to all the toll plazas, four-lane plus toll plazas across the country within the forthcoming year," he said.
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An advanced traffic management system is also in the works, with the first proposal covering the Delhi-NCR region already approved and bids set to be issued shortly. MoRTH also plans to focus investment on expressways and access-controlled highways to segregate slow- and fast-moving traffic and raise average vehicle speeds.