The Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT Madras) has entered into a collaboration with ExxonMobil Research and Engineering Company (EMRE) to carry out research on energy and bio-fuels.
The five-year joint research agreement focuses on bio-fuels, data analytics, gas conversion and transport, and is intended towards finding low-emission solutions, said a statement.
EMRE is the research and engineering arm of ExxonMobil Corporation, a leading global oil, natural gas and petrochemicals company. ExxonMobil has spent more than 9 billion dollars since 2000, developing and deploying low-emission energy solutions.
“India has a very fast growing middle-class and a strong desire to provide energy to its entire population. To achieve this, India has to develop technical solutions, which starts at the research level,” the statement said.
India is the third-highest producer of agro-residues globally with a surplus potential of over 230 million tonnes/year, after China and Brazil. India’s huge bio-fuel is expected to get realised in the near future with the ‘new bio-fuel policy’ of India, the statement added.
One of the projects being taken up under this research collaboration is to develop novel approaches to convert Indian Agro-residue biomass to sugar and high value chemicals.
“The objectives of this programme are three-fold. We aim to effectively deconstruct rice straw, bagasse and other biomass varieties of Indian origin to produce sugars, which will directly feed into ExxonMobil’s bioconversion platform. Secondly, we intend to convert the lignin present in biomass to valuable phenol using novel catalysts, and finally, we aim to evaluate the environmental and economic implications of performing such conversions at scale,” R Vinu, Associate Professor of Department of Chemical Engineering at IIT Madras, was quoted as saying in the statement.
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