EROEI.COM

Alka Zadgaonkar gets cheap fuel out of waste plastic. Will it one day power our cars?

An hour and a half after Professor Alka Zadgaonkar put a kilo of colourful shredded plastic bits into a tall reactor and fractionally distilled the outcome, she asks me to come over and take a look. A pale yellow liquid, the colour of evening light, has collected inside a beaker. It smells vaguely like petrol and, like gasoline, is fleetingly cool to the touch.

An employee at her plant in the industrial Buty Layout in Nagpur transfers the liquid into a plastic bottle, unhooks a Kawasaki Caliber’s fuel line and plunges it into the bottle. The shy, unassuming 44-year-old, who heads the department of chemistry at Nagpur’s GH Raisoni College of Engineering, asks me to go ahead and ride the bike.

With the employee riding pillion and holding the bottle with the fuel, I putter about the industrial park, trying to discern differences between petrol and Zadgaonkar’s plastic fuel. But save for a slight rough edge to the latter, there isn’t any. This is as good as petrol.

“It is petrol,” says Zadgaonkar, “Plastic is made from crude, if you break it down what you get is liquid hydrocarbon. One kilogram of waste plastic produces a litre of hydrocarbon.”

The scale of possibilities stretches all the way to a clear blue horizon— elimination of vile plastic waste (no landfills, no incineration), a cheaper source of energy to power our thirsty thermal power plants, DG sets, boilers, agricultural pumps and maybe, our cars.

What’s remarkable about Zadgaonkar’s effort is not depolymerisation or the breaking down of plastic into hydrocarbons — a fair number of scientists the world over have achieved that. “But all the other processes are too expensive, hers is very cheap,’’ says R Subba Rao, head of department of polymers, Amrita School of Engineering, Coimbatore.

“You also don’t need to segregate plastic waste and there is absolutely no residue,” adds Rao.

Zadgaonkar’s story began sometime in 1992, when she started researching polymers. “I have always loved the versatility of plastic, but something had to be done with plastic waste.” According to a 2003 Central Pollution Control Board study, of the over 10,000 metric tons of plastic waste, including industrial and imported plastic waste, generated daily in our country, only 40 per cent is recycled. The rest just lies there, poisoning the environment.

Finally, on a December morning eight years ago, Zadgaonkar knew she was on to something when the 300gm of plastic waste she was processing in her college lab broke down into a dark brown liquid. A few minutes later, a colleague came rushing in and asked her to check for a leakage in the lab’s LPG pipeline. His misplaced alarm was further and happy confirmation of the fact that the derivative was indeed liquid hydrocarbons.

The next couple of years saw the professor bring down the reaction parameters (temperature, pressure and conversion time were high in the initial stages) to feasible levels through improved catalytic additives. And, thoroughly aware of the failures of lab-scale inventions in scaled-up environments, Zadgaonkar upped the capacity a 100 times. The result was more hydrocarbons, which could then be fractionally distilled to derive petrol, diesel or LPG.

As Zadgaonkar further refined the process, the central government woke up and the petroleum ministry offered a multi-crore grant, which, not surprisingly in India, never materialised. Also, a tie-up with the Indian Oil Corporation for further testing and enhancing the product floundered in a bog of scepticism, indifference and, at times, envy (IOC’s tests validated most of Zadgaonkar’s claims, though). “A number of scientists were dismissive and certain individuals were more interested in the technology for themselves,’’ says husband Dr Umesh Zadgaonkar.

Tests on the plastic fuel conducted by several agencies, both government and private, highlighted the following characteristics: low sulphur content, low reaction temperature and better combustibility than petrol and diesel. In 2004, the couple set up The Unique Waste Plastic Management and Research Company with a loan from the State Bank of India.

Today, the Zadgaonkars run a 5 MT plant, which supplies fuel, priced at Rs 30 a litre, to neighbouring industrial units. By December 2005, they hope to expand capacity to 25 MT, with the ultimate aim being to take it up to 450 MT. Most of their raw material comes from the plastic waste dumped in their premises by the factories in the area.

Two months ago, the process passed a trial by commercial feasibility’s fire when Maharashtra Energy Development Agency tied up with the couple to sell the fuel to factories across the country.

But a much bigger opportunity obviously shines under the bonnets of cars. And the Zadgaonkars say it’s only a matter of time. “We’ve had a couple of vehicles running on our fuel for the last two years and they’ve been performing just fine,” says Umesh, who points to a list of reasons why their fuel should power your vehicle. “It has all the properties of motor spirit, even better flammability, can be calibrated to meet Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) norms and vehicle performance improves with use of plastic fuel.” It also scores points on the emission front: vehicles run on the plastic fuel have successfully passed PUC tests.

There are people who find the possibility of Zadgaonkars’ fuel in our vehicles remote at the moment, for a variety of reasons. The oil firms see the technology in use in small volume projects at the municipality level to produce fuel, and generate power.

“There are stringent requirements for motor spirits, and long-term suitability too has to be proven. Besides, if sold as a motor fuel across the country, there are both logistical and pricing issues involved,” says Shashikant Sharma, GM (R&D), Indian Petrochemicals Ltd. Soban Ghosh, part of the IOC team which evaluated the plastic fuel, says Zadgaonkar’s fuel could, at most, blend into the bulk stream at a refinery.

An official at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, who conducted research on the plastic fuel, says it has a high olefine content and “that could clog up a car’s fuel injectors.” “Refining the oil further and meeting the BIS norms will make it very expensive.” he adds.

At the sunnier end of the divide are observers who see a lot of potential. “They could start off with using it for stationary engines, breaking the oil cartel’s hold will be very difficult,” says PN Devarajan, former chairman of the National Environmental Engineering Institute.

But Rao says the Zadgaonkars should go for it. “Consider the economic advantages, it’ll slash a fair percentage of our crude import bill and you can derive LPG, petrol, kerosene, high speed diesel…” According to him, the project will require massive investments and political will, but it is well within the boundaries of feasibility. “I think we need to let the oil firms know that this fuel can never substitute petrol or diesel; it’ll probably cater to about 20 to 30 per cent of our fuel requirements.”

The Zadgaonkars too are aiming for that. In about a year or so, they say their plastic fuel will be powering our vehicles. At a price 40 per cent cheaper than regular fuel. If they can manage that, it’ll be the closest to alchemy mankind has ever got.

CHEMISTRY CLASS
Just how do the Zadgaonkars get fuel from plastic trash?