Synopsis:- As renewable isobutanol and sustainable aviation fuel move from pilot projects toward commercial scale in India, Praj Industries, Godavari Biorefineries and Balrampur Chini Mills sit in different parts of a supply chain that could benefit as the technology matures.
Aviation is one of the harder sectors to decarbonise, since batteries don’t work at altitude and there’s no easy substitute for liquid fuel. Sustainable Aviation Fuel, made from renewable feedstocks rather than crude oil, has become the industry’s preferred workaround, and one of the more promising production routes runs through a molecule most people have never heard of: isobutanol.
Made from sugarcane, grain or biomass and then chemically converted into jet fuel, it gives India a shot at building a domestic SAF supply chain using crops and infrastructure the country already has, rather than importing the technology wholesale.
What’s the news?
The clearest signal that this is moving from lab demonstration toward commercial reality is the long-running partnership between Praj Industries and Gevo, the US-based renewable fuels technology company.
The two have had a binding master framework agreement in place for several years covering the Alcohol-to-Jet, or AtJ, pathway and have already gone from R&D to actual flight: a 2023 AirAsia India flight between Pune and Delhi ran on SAF produced under the partnership, with the Indian Air Force separately testing and approving a sample against ASTM specifications.
What’s changed more recently is the scale of ambition, with Praj also signing a separate agreement with France’s Axens for the same alcohol-to-jet pathway, suggesting the company is trying to become India’s go-to engineering partner for this technology regardless of whose underlying licence it uses.
Praj Industries
Praj’s role in this chain is neither the grower of feedstock nor the eventual fuel seller, but the engineering firm in between. Under its exclusive arrangement with Gevo, Praj supplies the plant equipment, technology integration and EPC (engineering, procurement and construction) services that let a refinery actually convert renewable isobutanol into jet fuel and premium gasoline.
That matters commercially because Praj gets paid for building the plant well before a single litre of fuel is sold, which means revenue can show up in its order book long before the broader SAF market itself has scaled. The company’s FY26 order backlog stood at around Rs 4,305 crore, and its bioenergy-linked equipment business remains its largest single segment.
The stock closed on Friday around Rs. 323.50, valuing the company at roughly Rs. 5,947.27 crore, at a price-to-earnings ratio near 248.58, reflecting a market that has already priced in a fair amount of optimism about India’s ethanol and biofuel buildout.
Godavari Biorefineries
If Praj builds the plants, Godavari Biorefineries is one of the companies with the existing infrastructure and know-how to actually run one. It already operates a circular biorefinery model that converts sugarcane into a mix of ethanol, bio-based chemicals and specialty molecules, and its bio-based chemicals segment generated close to Rs. 578 crore in FY26, roughly 29% of consolidated revenue.
Within that segment, the higher-value specialty chemicals share has been rising too, moving from 57% to 63% of the segment’s mix over the past year, which the company has attributed to better product realisation. That existing R&D and processing base is precisely the kind of capability that would let Godavari pivot toward producing bio-isobutanol at scale if and when commercial demand from SAF producers actually materialises, rather than needing to build that expertise from scratch.
Shares closed on Friday around Rs. 278.90, with a market capitalisation near Rs. 1,430.37 crore, at a price-to-earnings ratio that looks unusually high (400.20) due to a thin current profit base following a year of exceptional charges.
Balrampur Chini Mills
Balrampur Chini sits a step further back in the chain as one of India’s largest integrated sugar producers with direct control over sugarcane crushing, the primary source of the fermentable sugars that any isobutanol or ethanol producer eventually needs as feedstock.
The company has been actively working to reduce its dependence on government-regulated sugar pricing, targeting around 40% of revenue from its distillery segment by FY27, and it’s also building an Rs. 2,850 crore polylactic acid bioplastics plant using sugarcane as feedstock, its most concrete move yet into higher-value biomaterials beyond ethanol. The company sits on a huge aggregate crushing capacity of 80,000 tonnes/day and an aggregate distillery capacity of 1,050 kilolitres/day.
Owning the upstream cane supply gives Balrampur a position most pure-play biofuel companies don’t have: if isobutanol demand for SAF does scale up meaningfully, the company that controls feedstock aggregation is in a position to negotiate on more favourable terms than one that has to buy sugar or molasses on the open market. Shares closed on Friday around Rs. 610.15, with a market capitalisation near Rs. 12,866.17 crore, at a price-to-earnings ratio of roughly 37.85.
What is the exposure?
The three companies aren’t really competing with each other so much as occupying different links of the same potential value chain, which is worth keeping in mind when comparing them. Praj’s exposure is the most direct and immediate, since it earns EPC revenue on plant construction regardless of how the eventual SAF market plays out, provided refineries keep signing up.
Godavari’s exposure is more about optionality, since its existing specialty chemicals capability could pivot toward isobutanol, but there’s no indication yet of a firm commercial isobutanol programme at the company.
Balrampur’s position is the most indirect of the three, resting on the general thesis that feedstock control becomes more valuable as downstream demand for advanced bio-products grows, rather than on any specific isobutanol or SAF contract disclosed so far.
What Should Investors Look Out For?
None of this changes the fact that SAF adoption in India remains at an early, largely policy-dependent stage, with commercial volumes still small relative to conventional jet fuel. Investors should track whether Praj’s Gevo and Axens partnerships convert into actual refinery orders with disclosed contract values, since MoUs and framework agreements in this space have a long history of moving slower than initial announcements suggest.
It’s also worth watching whether Godavari’s speciality chemicals mix keeps improving or plateaus and whether Balrampur’s distillery and bioplastics investments actually hit their FY27 revenue targets, since a lot of the bull case here rests on execution timelines that have already been pushed back once or twice across the sector.
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