Billionaires bet big on India's bio-fuel

Rajesh Abraham in Mumbai | BS | June 23, 2007 | 04:10 IST

India's well-known investors who are known for their Midas touch have spotted an opportunity in bio-fuel, betting big on ethanol, bio-mass and even bio-fuel equipment makers in India and other parts of the globe.

Billionaires Rakesh Jhunjhunwala, C Sivasankaran, Vinod Khosla, founder of Sun Microsystems, and Nemish Shah, the media-shy joint partner of Enam Financial Services, are investing in bio-fuel makers quietly, expecting that bio-fuel will have a big play in the coming years as the world looks for a viable alternative to the fast depleting oil reserves.

Jhunjhunwala, who is known for his ability to spot a multi-bagger at a very early stage, recently invested in Hyderabad-based bio-fuel firm Nandan Biometrics.

He is also a 10 per cent stakeholder in Praj Industries, which is a bio-fuel technology provider and equipment maker.

"Bhai (as Jhunjhunwala is known in market circles) is bullish on biofuel and the broad alternative energy space. He is looking at several unlisted companies for more investments," said a source.

Vinod Khosla, the founder of Sun Microsystems and a leading green fuel investor through his Khosla Ventures, holds a minor stake in Praj Industries.

But, Khosla, who is scouting for more investments in India, is playing a high stakes game in Brazil.

He has backed Brazilian Renewable Energy Company (Brenco) and also made investments in Segetis, founded by former Soviet scientists Sergey and Olga Selifonova, to develop renewable chemical products.

C Sivasankaran, who sold his stake in mobile phone company Aircel to Malaysian conglomerate Maxis Communications for over $1 billion, has set up "E85 Inc", an ethanol producing company in Raleigh, North Carolina, investing $200 million late last year.

"Alternative energy, broadly, is an area which we are excited about as an investment opportunity," said Rahul Bhasin, managing director, Barings Private Equity, which has invested in Auro Mira Energy, a wind energy company.

Market sources say Nemish Shah, who spotted multi-baggers Sesa Goa and Infosys when everyone was looking the other way in the early 1990s, is also making quiet moves in biofuel companies in India, both listed and unlisted.

Sources say little known IKF Technologies, which is entering bio-fuel production in a big way, has come on his investment radar.

A listed company, IKF Tech recently sought government leases for a total of 150,000 hectares of land in Swaziland, Mozambique and South Africa to cultivate jatropha to produce biofuel.

"There are several factors that can make India successful in the alternative energy space: availability of natural resources, cost-effective engineering and manufacturing talent and high cost of importing traditional fuels," said Arun Natarajan of Venture Intelligence, a PE tracking firm.
"While I do not see alternative energy posing a threat to sectors that are traditional favourites with investors -- like IT & IT-enabled services and manufacturing -- any time soon, there is definitely a strong interest in this sector," he added.

Programa de Reaproveitamento de Óleo Vegetal

SÁBADO, 23 JUNHO 2007 . BIODIESELBR.COM

O Programa de Reaproveitamento de Óleos Vegetais (Prove), iniciativa da Refinaria de Manguinhos, em parceria com a Secretaria de Meio Ambiente do Rio, está ampliando suas parcerias para aumentar o volume adquirido de óleo de cozinha usado.

O PROVE utiliza como mão-de-obra principal catadores de óleo reunidos em cooperativas. Atualmente, 25 cooperativas de catadores já participam do projeto, coletando óleo de cozinha usado em vários pontos da cidade para enviá-lo a Refinaria de Manguinhos, em Bonsucesso, onde é transformado em biodiesel.

A meta de produção da refinaria de Manguinhos é de 4,5 milhões de litros por ano de biodiesel, o que proporcionará às cooperativas renda de cerca de R$ 2,7 milhões.

Com a parceria, Manguinhos contribuirá para a redução da poluição dos rios e da Baía de Guanabara e do custo de tratamento de esgoto. A produção de biodiesel a partir do reaproveitamento do óleo vegetal é a primeira experiência nessa área feita no estado do Rio.

O programa iniciou o processo de certificação de restaurantes, escolas e condomínios.

- Quem quiser participar basta separar o óleo de cozinha usado em recipiente e telefonar para o Disque-Prove, no telefone 021 2598-9240 - informou Carlos Minc, secretário estadual do ambiente.

Somente no Circo Voador, que participa do projeto, deverão ser coletados 30 litros de óleo usado por semana. Além do óleo usado de pequenas lanchonetes e da creche do Circo Voador, seus funcionários estão trazendo o produto de casa.

O programa possui um caminhão coletor, doado pelo Orla Rio, que já está rodando por diversos pontos de coleta de óleo de cozinha usado instalados na cidade.

Farms Fund Robots to Replace Migrant Fruit Pickers

As if the debate over immigration and guest worker programs wasn't complicated enough, now a couple of robots are rolling into the middle of it.

Vision Robotics, a San Diego company, is working on a pair of robots that would trundle through orchards plucking oranges, apples or other fruit from the trees. In a few years, troops of these machines could perform the tedious and labor-intensive task of fruit picking that currently employs thousands of migrant workers each season.

The robotic work has been funded entirely by agricultural associations, and pushed forward by the uncertainty surrounding the migrant labor force. Farmers are "very, very nervous about the availability and cost of labor in the near future," says Vision Robotics CEO Derek Morikawa.

Agricultural groups hope Vision Robotics can build this harvester to replace labor crews.
Image: Vision Robotics

It's a surprising new market for Vision Robotics, which had been focused on developing consumer devices, including a robotic vacuum cleaner to compete with iRobot's Roomba.

When a member of the California Citrus Research Board approached the company in 2004, Morikawa was doubtful that an effective robotic picker was even feasible. A citrus grower brought the skeptical engineers to an orange farm in California's fertile Central Valley, where they walked down the neat rows of trees and stared at the oranges hanging in the branches.

Previous attempts at making a mechanical harvester were thwarted by inefficiency, explains Morikawa. In the past, experimental machines approached a tree as a human would, picking one piece of fruit and then looking for the next. In this slow process, the machine circled the tree repeatedly until it was sure it had picked all the fruit.

Morikawa says his engineers had their breakthrough idea right there in the orange grove. They realized that the task could be divided between two robots: One would locate all the oranges, and the second would pick them. "Once you know where all the fruit is, then it becomes an easy job to calculate the most efficient way to pick it all," says Morikawa.

The eight-armed orange harvester will strip ripe fruit from trees.
Image: Vision Robotics

But it wasn't just technological challenges that held back previous attempts at building a mechanical harvester –- politics got involved, too. Cesar Chavez, the legendary leader of the United Farm Workers, began a campaign against mechanization back in 1978.

Chavez was outraged that the federal government was funding research and development on agricultural machines, but not spending any money to aid the farm workers who would be displaced. In the '80s, that simmering anger merged with a growing realization that the technology was nowhere near ready, and government funding dried up.

This time around, growers' associations are funding the research. By the end of this year, the orange growers will have invested almost $1 million in the project, says Ted Baskin, president of the California Citrus Research Board. He estimates that it will take about $5 million more to get to the finished product.

The farmers are willing to pay up because they've been rattled by a labor shortage over the past few years -- California growers tell horror stories of watching their fruit rot on the trees as they waited for the picking crews to arrive. Last fall, growers rallied in front of the U.S. Capitol, frustrated that Congress still hadn't created a program to ease the passage of foreign guest workers across the Mexico border.

With the supply-and-demand equation uncertain, growers see the robots as a better option. "You can predict what it's going to cost to buy a machine and maintain it," says Baskin. "You can't predict the bargaining that we go through with contract labor," he says.

The two robots would work as a team: one an eagle-eyed scout, the other a metallic octopus with a gentle touch. The first robot will scan the tree and build a 3-D map of the location and size of each orange, calculating the best order in which to pick them. It sends that information to the second robot, a harvester that will pick the tree clean, following a planned sequence that keeps its eight long arms from bumping into each other.

The Vision Robotics engineers are currently building the scout. They expect to have a prototype ready next year, with the harvester to follow two or three years later. Baskin says he doesn't expect the mechanical systems to pose any serious problems. The hard work is writing the software. After the scout robot makes a 3-D map of the tree, it has to evaluate each piece of fruit. What size is the orange? What color is it? Does it have black spots on it? "It's a question of gathering the information, and then judging whether it meets the parameters that are equal to a good orange," Baskin says.

Vision Robotics has been working on that problem for almost four years now, which might give some reassurance to human pickers. The United Farm Workers' leaders say they aren't worried about the robots, because they don't believe the machines will ever be able to do the job as well as people. Spokesman Marc Grossman predicts that mechanical hands will damage the fruit and make it unappealing for supermarket shoppers. "There are already machines that will pick wine grapes, but the high end wine growers don’t use them, because they want the quality," Grossman says.

Farmers don't seem to share that concern. The Washington Tree Fruit Commission started investing in the project last year, and Vision Robotics is talking to other agricultural groups with crops ranging from cherries to asparagus.

Rio antecipa adição do biodiesel para ônibus

Em um ano, a economia é de 32 milhões de litros de óleo diesel

Rio de Janeiro - Nos próximos quatro meses, cerca de 3 mil dos 14,5 mil ônibus que circulam na região metropolitana do Rio de Janeiro, utilizarão como combustível o óleo diesel derivado do petróleo com a adição de 5% de biodiesel - o diesel vegetal.

Nesse período, uma empresa especializada fará o monitoramento da qualidade do ar e do desempenho dos motores, e os dados serão analisados pela Agência Nacional do Petróleo, Gás Natural e Biocombustíveis (ANP).

O projeto experimental foi apresentado na quinta-feira, 31, em solenidade na Federação do Comércio e resulta de parceria entre a Secretaria Estadual de Transportes, a Petrobras Distribuidora, a Federação das Empresas de Transporte de Passageiros do Rio (Fetranspor) e as montadoras Volkswagen e Mercedes-Benz.

Na prática, o projeto antecipa em quase sete anos a lei federal que torna obrigatória, em janeiro de 2013, a utilização do B5, diesel mineral com adição de 5% de biodiesel. A mesma lei prevê, já para janeiro do próximo ano, o uso do B2, diesel comum com 2% de adição do novo combustível.

O secretário de Transportes, Júlio Lopes, destacou o pioneirismo do Rio de Janeiro em relação a combustíveis mais limpos: "Em um ano, 3 mil ônibus rodando com biodiesel a 5% significam uma economia de 32 milhões de litros de óleo diesel".

Para o coordenador de Meio Ambiente da Fetranspor, Guilherme Wilson da Conceição, o projeto não vai pesar no bolso dos usuários do transporte público, porque as tarifas não serão alteradas: "O biodiesel ainda é um pouco mais caro que o diesel, mas a BR Distribuidora nos garantiu que não vai repassar esta diferença. Vamos manter a mesma qualidade do transporte poluindo menos".

Dados da Agência Internacional de Energia indicam que o setor de transportes em todo o mundo é responsável por cerca de 24% do dióxido de carbono (CO2) lançado na atmosfera. E que a participação das frotas das grandes cidades na emissão de gases do efeito estufa aumenta 2,5% a cada ano. Nos países em desenvolvimento, essa taxa atinge até 4,4% ao ano.