India eyes Brazil’s ethanol technology to lower oil imports

India has been accelerating efforts to achieve 20 percent ethanol blending with petrol by 2025 in a bid to reduce reliance on crude oil imports. India is looking to benefit by taking a leaf out of the techniques used by the Latin American nation for ethanol blending.

India aims to reduce its dependence on crude oil imports by learning and adopting advanced technologies deployed by Brazil for ethanol mixing. The two nations have also decided to double trade between them targeting $50 billion by 2030 from $15.2 billion currently.

India has been accelerating efforts to achieve 20 percent ethanol blending with petrol by 2025 in a bid to reduce reliance on crude oil imports. The average blending rate has been 10 percent ethanol in petrol as of June 2022.

Since Brazil, a top producer of sugarcane and ethanol, has been one of the pioneers in integrating biofuels into its fuel economy, India is looking to benefit by taking a leaf out of the techniques used by the Latin American nation for ethanol blending.

The country’s overall import of crude oil rose to $162.2 billion in FY23, up from $107.5 billion the previous year, data from the Department of Commerce shows.

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Barthwal was on an official visit to Brazil from October 1-4 for the sixth meeting of the India-Brazil Trade Monitoring Mechanism where as per him, “several issues were taken forward.”

Brazil has also joined the Global Biofuel Alliance, proposed by India, with an aim to develop an alliance of governments, international organisations and industry to facilitate the adoption of biofuels.

The two nations also discussed ways to expand the MERCOSUR agreement, which currently has only 52 goods and four tariff lines. “Both sides agreed that it should be expanded to all the tariff lines where trade occurs and there should be expansion of goods and services trade between the countries,” Barthwal said.

MERCOSUR is a trading bloc in the South American region comprising Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay. A PTA was signed between India and MERCOSUR in New Delhi on January 25, 2004.

Modi and Lula had on September 10, agreed to work together for the expansion of India-MERCOSUR Preferential Trade Agreement (PTA) during Brazil’s MERCOSUR Presidency to leverage the full potential of their economic partnership.