Second Generation Biofuels Plant Opens

The biofuel industry has seen an important development this month.  A new plant producing ethanol has officially opened in Crescentino, Northern Italy.  Whilst in itself, this is not particularly news-worthy, the process being employed to create the fuel is rather different.  Instead of fermenting grain as happens in traditional plants such as Ensus and Vivergo in the UK, the new facility uses enzymes to break down plant cellulose to produce the sugars to create bioethanol.  Therefore, any plant material can theoretically be used in the process and not just grains.  The plant is being fuelled by wheat and rice straw, and arundo donax (a high-yielding biomass crop grown on marginal land).  The waste material produced by the process (lignin) is burnt in a on-site plant to produce power for the refinery and to be exported to the grid.

The facility is operated by Beta Renewables and Novozymes.  They have plans for many more such ‘second generation’ biofuel plants if the Italian refinery is successful.  The plant is designed to produce somewhere between 50-100,000 tonnes of bio-ethanol per year (depending on actual sugar yields).  Obviously this is somewhat smaller than the 300,000 tonne capacity of the likes of Ensus, but this is the first commercial-scale deployment of the technology.  The owners are confident that they can be price-competitive with other sources of fuel.  Obviously, this technological advance (if successful)  makes the fuel versus food debate much less important.  It may also open up new income opportunities for farming for the sale of ‘waste’ products such as straw.