Brazilian Ethanol Producer Sees Boost from Plant Waste

07/03/2017 - 13h02

Raízen Energia, Brazil's largest producer of sugar cane ethanol, is planning to scale up production at a new "second-generation" biofuel plant, in a move that will sharply increase the productivity of one of the country's most important industries.

The company says that it will increase production more than fivefold within two years, making the new technology competitive with traditional ethanol and harnessing potentially millions of tonnes of plant material that currently goes to waste.

Brazil is the second-largest producer of ethanol in the world after the US, with much of its fleet of vehicles adapted to be able to run on ethanol only or on a petrol-ethanol mix. Petrol stations normally supply both ethanol and fossil fuels.

While a number of countries are commercialising cellulose from plants for use as ethanol, Brazilian sugar cane waste, known as bagasse, is seen as one of the most promising sources because of its plentiful supply and the large existing infrastructure for processing conventional ethanol.

"Second generation technology allows you to extract more value from what you have," said João Alberto Fernández de Abreu, chief executive officer of Raízen Energia, part of a joint venture between Brazil's largest sugar producer, Cosan, and oil major Royal Dutch Shell.

"You produce more ethanol in the same area. It is using feedstock that is today being wasted."

The Raízen plant, in Piracicaba in São Paulo state, produced 7m litres of next-generation ethanol last year and is on course to double this in 2017. Mr Abreu said it would produce 40m by 2018, said Mr Abreu.

That is tiny compared to the around 30bn litres of conventional ethanol produced annually in Brazil, but would be enough to make the second-generation product cost competitive and could prove the technology is ready to be rolled out more widely.

While first generation plants convert the sucrose extracted from sugar cane into ethanol, second generation technology uses enzymes to break down the waste from the traditional sugar cane crushing process and convert it to sugars that can be fermented into biofuel.

The state of São Paulo, the main producer of sugar and ethanol in Brazil, produced 45m tonnes of biomass a year in the form of the discarded tops of plants and their leaves, which were left on the ground. 

The improved efficiency from second-generation ethanol means sugar cane biofuel will have a lower carbon footprint. Brazil is hoping this will give its exports an edge over competitors, since countries have agreed to cut their carbon emissions.

"The Brazilian commitment to the Paris accord implies that [ethanol] production needs to double," said Juan Carlos Castilla-Rubio, acting chief innovation officer of Raízen Energia and chairman of Space Time Ventures, a strategic partner of the company. "It is important to transform the industry in terms of productivity before you do this." 

Raízen has 24 traditional first generation ethanol plants and Mr Abreu said these could be married with seven or eight large-scale second generation plants to realise the full potential of the new technology. 

This configuration would increase Raízen's current production of more than 2bn litres by about 1bn litres of ethanol, or 50 per cent, he said. But the project would only be presented to the board once the existing plant was operating at full potential. 

He said the plant would need to be increased in size by about 2.5 times, to 100m litres a year, for "optimal" economies of scale. Raízen's existing second generation plant would need just 300,000 tonnes of dry biomass to run at full capacity.

"The challenge now is related to mechanical issues, it is not technology. The technology is working," Mr Abreu said. 

The problems to be overcome included removing impurities from the fuels as well as logistics bottlenecks. "Our challenge is much more related to logistics - you must be able to bring at competitive cost all the biomass that is available in the fields," he said. 

In addition to working on second generation ethanol, Raízen was exploring other ways to use sugar cane and its byproducts, including methane to power its fleet of harvesters and trucks and biochemicals to compete with petrochemicals.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2017