Ethanol producers have offered 19.32 billion litres against the oil marketing companies’ (OMCs) tender requirement of 11 billion litres for the 2026-27 supply year, with maize-based ethanol accounting for nearly 60% of the total offers. The quantity offered is close to India’s officially confirmed distillation capacity of 19.5 billion litres, indicating that almost the entire capacity has been offered for ethanol production.
The scale of the offers comes even as the OMCs are estimated to require another 1 billion litres (over and above the 11 billion litres already asked for) to meet the E20 petrol-blending mandate, while private-sector oil companies are expected to require 1.2 billion litres. Other end-use industries, including poultry feed, food processing and starch manufacturing, require an estimated 4 billion litres of ethanol, after adjusting for exports and imports, according to industry estimates. The large volume of maize-based ethanol offers suggests that the crop remains a profitable input for suppliers despite the reduction in procurement price of maize-based ethanol by ₹ 3 per litre — from ₹ 71.86 to ₹ 68.86 per litre — for the 2026–27 Ethanol Supply Year (ESY), the expert said. The allocation of the 11 billion litre tender requirement is likely to comprise 3.24 billion litres of ethanol made from surplus rice issued by the Food Corporation of India (FCI), 1.6 billion litres made from damaged food grains and 970 million litres made from molasses, according to an industry estimate.
Because maize production is estimated by industry experts to be around 15% lower than the previous year when it stood at 55 million tonnes, this is significant.
