Empee plans fuel wood for power plants

Chennai: Empee Distilleries Ltd is exploring opportunities to get into captive farming of fuel wood to feed its biomass-based power plants, according to company officials.

The company has licence to set up three plants at Pudukottai, Perambalur and Thiruvarur districts.

The first unit, a 10-MW biomass-based power plant, which will supply its entire power to the Tamil Nadu grid, has gone on stream. The company is planning to bring under fuel wood cultivation over 20,000 acres of wasteland through this project, according to Mr M.P. Purushothaman, Chairman, Empee Group.

The company is now procuring biomass from growers, and hopes to augment this supply through the wasteland development project.

According to officials, the company’s expansion programme is onstream, including the backward integration to set up a 60-kilolitre-a-day grain-based alcohol distillery in Nellore; a blending and bottling plant for IMFL in Nellore with a capacity of 7,000 cases a month; and doubling capacity of the Appollo Alchobev unit in Karnataka, to one lakh cases a month.

Empee Distilleries has also completed the expansion of the re-distillation plant near Poonamallee to 70 kilolitres a day from 20 kilolitres a day. It plans to increase the capacity of the bottling plant here to 4.19 lakh cases a month from the present capacity of 3.19 lakh cases.

The company has announced an interim dividend of Rs 3 a share (30 per cent) for the half year ended April 30, 2008. Empee follows October-September accounting year.