Thank you sir for organizing such a good industrial visit in which we have visited DBT-ICT

Centre. Which is the India’s first National Bioenergy Research Centre. The DBT-ICT Centre for
Energy Biosciences is a unique place with integrated basic and translational science capabilities
for bioprocess development and scale up. Funded by The Department of Biotechnology, Ministry
of Science and Technology, India, the Centre was established and formally inaugurated in May
2009. Built at a total cumulative cost equivalent to USD 10 Million, the Centre is a part of the
Institute of Chemical Technology (ICT) at Matunga, Mumbai, which is a deemed University
under Section 3 of UGC Act 1956. The Centre was set up as a result of vision and efforts of Dr.
M. K. Bhan, Secretary DBT and Dr. Renu Swarup, Advisor DBT, and functions under the
leadership of Dr. G. D. Yadav, Vice Chancellor, ICT. The projects and technical programs at the
Centre are coordinated by Dr. Arvind Lali. The Centre is focused primarily at developing
biotechnologies for deriving biofuels from renewable resources for reducing India’s rising
dependence on petroleum fuels and cut down greenhouse gas emissions. According to all
indications, it is clear that the world is heading fast towards a major energy crisis and major
environmental problem. It is estimated that at the present rate of consumption, entire estimated
range of recoverable oil in the world will be completely exhausted by the year 2015 or 2025.
First we have visited pre-treatment lab where they have explained various technique to convert
waste material into useful product like plastic to oi and conversion of agricultural waste material
to bioethanol. Bioethanol also comes under biofuels, biofuels are a renewable energy source,
made from organic matter or wastes that can play a valuable role in reducing carbon dioxide
emissions. Biofuels are one of the largest sources of renewable energy in use today. In the
transport sector, they are blended with existing fuels such as gasoline and diesel. In the future,
they can be particularly important to help decarbonise the aviation, marine and heavy-duty road
transport sectors. Biofuels can be produced from organic matter, or biomass, such as corn or sugar,
vegetable oils or waste feedstock’s. As biofuels emit less carbon dioxide than conventional fuels
they can be blended with existing fuels as an effective way of reducing carbon dioxide emissions in
the transport sector. Which is also known as second generation plant. today most biofuels are
produced from agricultural crops and are called conventional biofuels. New technologies and
processes that produce fuels from waste, inedible crops or forestry products are being developed
and these fuels are known as advanced, or second-generation biofuels. Advanced biofuels are likely
to become the primary form of biofuels in the future as they can improve their sustainability. Ethanol
is produced by fermenting sugar or starch from products such as sugarcane, maize or wheat. It is
used in blended fuels with petrol, either at low levels in regular vehicles (up to 10%) or at higher
levels in cars that have been adapted to take both petrol and ethanol, known as “flex-fuel”
vehicles. Biodiesel is produced from vegetable oils, fats or greases. It is blended with diesel,
generally at low levels (up to 7%) but our government is trying to increase its number. After the
basic introduction they have explained its second generation plant design and its whole process
from waste to bioethanol as main product.
Waste to Fuel Innovations:
The DBT-ICT Technology Platforms (1) Lignocellulosic Sugars (2) Catalytically Thermo-
Liquefied CTL-Oil (3) Lignin Hydrolysate

DBT-ICT 2G-Alcohol Technology Six Novel Processing Segments:

1. Biomass Fractionation 2. Enzyme Hydrolysis 3. HCD Fermentation 4. Silica Recovery (Rice
straw) 5. Water/Reagent Recovery 6. Recovery of inorganic Fertilizer. Four Established
Supporting Segments Added as established Plug-in Modules from known vendors are: 1.
Alcohol Purification 2. Lignin concentration (similar to pulping mills) 3. Steam Production
(similar to pulping mills) 4. Power Production (similar to any cogen plants). BIRAC
SUPPORTED 10 ton biomass/day Lignocellulose Ethanol Demonstration Plant India Glycols
Limited, Kashipur World’s First Multi-feedstock Continuous 2G-Ethanol Plant. Technology
being scaled up to commercial scale 2G-Ethanol plants by Hindustan Petroleum Corp. and
Bharat Petroleum Corp. Engineering Partners: L&T Hydrocarbon Engineering.
After seeing all these thing they have explained the setup which they used for conversion of plastic
waste to bio oil. During pyrolysis, biomass is heated rapidly at high temperatures (500°C–700°C) in
an oxygen-free environment. The heat breaks down biomass into pyrolysis vapour, gas, and char.
Once the char is removed, the vapours are cooled and condensed into a liquid “bio-crude” oil.
Instead of that they have used some microorganism which help him to do so. When working with
wet feedstock’s like algae, hydrothermal liquefaction is the preferred thermal process. This process
uses water under moderate temperatures (200°C–350°C) and elevated pressures to convert biomass
into liquid bio-crude oil. After the pre-treatment lab we have visited enzyme technology lab where a
develop of viable processes for microbial/enzyme catalysed bio-transformations takes place and also
Develop stable immobilized biocatalyst preparations. After visiting this lab we have moved to
fermentation technology lab whose objective is to Identify microorganisms and develop a
technology and process for large scale economic fermentation production. After fermentation
process gets over they use various downstream process like membrane technology, chromatography
and Solvent -solvent extraction process etc. Depending upon their requirement we can use any
method for separation mostly they are using membrane technology where they have module which
is made of different polymer the membrane module they have used in that process are made up of
polyamide and it shape is hollow. They have also explained the working of membrane module it
have two outlet side one is being used for retentate and other one is permeate. Based on pore size
they are classified into various categories like micro filtration, ultra-filtration, nano-filtration and
reverse osmosis. Based on the size of the particle which we are going to separate, we decide which
type of membrane we have to choose for separation process. Membrane are also classified based on
their shape like flat membrane, spiral membrane, hollow membrane and tubular membrane. And for
solvent solvent extraction we use liquid-liquid extraction process to separate one liquid from
another liquid, for this we have to choose one suitable solvent in which one component of mixture
are soluble and other are not so by doing all these procedure we separate the desire product and in
some cases they also use chromatography techniques in chromatography generally they used gas
chromatography technique to separate the product from it. After that we have moved to algal
biotechnology lab whose objective is to explore algae as a source of biofuel feedstock biodiesel or
value added products and also develop knowledge, technology and process strategies for sustainable
production of algae as feedstock for fuel & chemicals. Photo bioreactor or Raceway pond designing
for efficient scale up of algae as biofuel feedstock. Algal technology is the third generation method
to make biofuel from it by using solar energy technique. These are the thing which we have seen
their during our one day industrial visit where we have seen different – different setup and also
learnt full procedure of it and also have seen different experimental setup and its working . Overall
it is very good exposure for us who is fresh bioprocess engineer.