Jan. 31 (Bloomberg) — ETH Bioenergia SA, the Brazilian
sugar-cane processor that gets 15 percent of its revenues from
burning crop waste, will build a demonstration plant with
Denmark’s Inbicon A/S to turn those residues into ethanol fuel.
The plant, which would start working in 2015, will be able
to produce several million liters of ethanol a year and will be
attached to one of its nine mills, Carlos Eduardo Calmanovici,
director of innovation and technology at the Sao Paulo-based
company, said today in a telephone interview.
ETH Bioenergia is seeking to boost income from its biomass,
which is either left in the field or burned for making
electricity that’s sold to the grid, Calmanovici said. Falling
power prices in Brazil have spurred the company to study
processing it into ethanol using Inbicon’s enzyme technology.
“Prices were much higher two years ago” for electricity
in government-organized auctions for new power plants, he said.
“It’s clear that only producing bio-electricity is not the best
way to add value to biomass.”
The sales price of electricity fell to an average 87.94
reais a megawatt hour in a December auction, a decline of 34
percent from two auctions in 2010, according to national energy
agency Empresa de Pesquisa Energetica.
Brazil produces all of the ethanol fuel for its cars from
sugar-cane juice, he said. By 2020, it may produce as much as 1
billion liters of the fuel a year from the straw and
crushed stalks coming from the crop. Brazil’s industry makes
about 25 billion liters (6.6 billion gallons) of the fuel now.
ETH Bioenergia, a unit of Brazil’s largest construction
company Odebrecht SA, expects to be able to produce 3 billion
liters of ethanol and 2,700 gigawatt-hours of power from cane
residues in 2015, the company said in a statement yesterday.
Inbicon has been operating a cellulosic-ethanol
demonstration plant in Denmark for eight years, he said. The
company is a unit of Denmark’s state-controlled utility Dong
Energy A/S.
To contact the reporter on this story:
Stephan Nielsen in Sao Paulo at
snielsen8@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Reed Landberg at
landberg@bloomberg.net
