Indian Oil Corp., the top refiner in the nation, announced on Friday that it plans to use bio-naphtha in its crackers to decarbonize its petrochemical feedstocks.
“To attain sustainability, bio-based feedstocks such as bio-naphtha and bio-ethanol are being envisaged as the natural transition for the petrochemical industry,” the company’s Chairman Shrikant Madhav Vaidya said at Asia Petrochemical Industry Conference, without providing a timeline.
Bio-naphtha is typically obtained from hydro-treatment of used vegetable and cooking oils.
“It is under research and development at our Faridabad facility in northern India… we have kept the used cooking oil pathway open but we’re trying to get it via bio-ethanol,” the company’s executive director of petrochemicals, A. S. Sahney, told Reuters on the sidelines of the event.
