Watched this video …Praj - well explained…
With all due respect for all authors of various books that are published, normally authors want to make his book very exciting …and consequently they try to mention many stories based upon their past experience with an event or a situation which may not be always relevant.
While Praj is a pure Biotechnology company with multiple futuristic verticals and many of them would play out sooner or later , but for me the immediate story is still ethanol…Ethanol is here to stay…
If Green Hydrogen/ EV is the ultimate answer for automobiles , but will take very long lead time 5-10 years even more…so in the mean time, Ethanol Petrol blend and CNG woul be the preferred Automobile fuel at least for India.
All the Govt intiatives so far is based upon clear logic and reasons which they are determined to execute/ implement the ethanol petrol blend.
(1) with 25% ethanol blend , they are going to save 15 Billion USD In foreign exchange in a year which works out to more than 1,10,000 Crores in INR per annum. (our oil imports bill is 61 Billion USD )…and to that extent, it reduces our dependency upon other oil exporting countries which many times try to Arm-twist India…to that extent we are also insured against crude volatility in the Globe.
(2) Cut carbon emissions proportionately … imagine ethanol reduces Carbon emissions by at least 75%, when compared with Petrol, which the Govt can not ignore as India has committed in all world forums to cut carbon emission in targeted time lines
(3) Ethanol is a sustainable fuel…even if it emits Carbon at much reduced level, the carbon gets recycled or used up by the Sugarcane Crops and other crops through photosynthesis…so to some extent it can be considered as carbon neutral.
(4) Due to its anti knock quality, ethanol petrol blend has higher octane number than normal petrol and we can avoid the use of the pollutant Additive MTBE with petrol…we also import MTBE
However, the only negative I could see is as I mentioned in one of my posts above…that we depend too much on Rain water …50% of our arable land are monsoon dependent…in case of a couple of monsoon failure , then the entire ethanol story gets affected
So the need of the hour is to plan alternatives water irrigation, proper incentives to farmers for growing multiple crops.
Discl : invested for long term…I don’t look at QoQ results for this stock.
I may be biased. Please do your own assessment before you invest