Million-ton bioethanol plant in China

Via a Chinese joint venture, M&G Chemicals of Italy’s Mossi Ghisolfi Group plans to make an additional million annual tons of bioethanol and bioglycols available by as early as 2016.

The supply of bioethanol – as the key ingredient with which Coca Cola has already revolutionised the PET packaging market with its BioPET 30 PlantBottle and which is now being developed in polyester fibre form for nonwovens and textiles – is currently dominated by Brazil’s Braskem.

M&G will construct a second-generation bio-refinery in the region of Fuyang, Anhui Province in China in a joint-venture with Chinese company Guozhen.

Guozhen will make available a million metric tons of straw biomass and use the lignin obtained as a by-product from the bio-refinery to feed a 45 MW cogeneration plant which will be constructed at the same time on the same site.

M&G will be majority partner of the bio-refinery and minority partner of the power plant.

The bio-refinery will employ Proesa technology licensed from Beta Renewables, a joint venture between Biochemtex (a company belonging to the Mossi Ghisolfi Group), US private equity fund TPG and Danish enzyme producer Novozymes.

The second-generation bio-refinery will be approximately four times the size – in terms of the volume of biomass processed – of that built by Beta Renewables in Crescentino, Italy, which was recently inaugurated.

The plant, which is expected to require capital expenditures of approximately half a billion US dollars, is expected to be brought on stream in mid 2015.

The necessary enzymes will be supplied by Novozymes.

“This is the first act of a green revolution that M&G Chemicals is bringing to the polyester chain to provide environmental sustainability to both PET beverage packaging and polyester textiles” said Marco Ghisolfi, CEO of M&G Chemicals. “The timing and scope of our green polyester revolution and our manufacturing entry in China from the green PET raw materials avenue is even more relevant considering Coca Cola plans to use PlantBottle packaging for all of their PET plastic bottles across the globe by 2020.”

“M&G Chemicals is today taking a big step towards a bio-based society where biomass is used for products like fuel, chemicals and plastics,” added Thomas Videbæk, executive vice president and head of business development at Novozymes. “We are incredibly excited to enable M&G Chemicals’ vision of producing bioplastics on a commercial scale and are looking forward to the long-term collaboration.”

The second-generation bio-refinery and power cogeneration project is the core part of the Biomass Utilization Park that Guozhen plans to build in Fuyang City.

“Fuyang is rich in biomass resources, Guozhen is experienced in biomass collections and logistics and M&G Chemicals owns the proven cutting-edge technology,” said Li Wei, chairman of the Guozhen Group. !Our cooperation will open a new era of biomass utilization and provide an effective solution for the full exploitation of biomass to tackle Chinese energy demand and environmental issues.”

Fuyang City is a large agricultural region in northwest Anhui Province. The crop planting area is up to 1.2 million hectares with an annual six million tons of straw biomass available. The second-generation bio-refinery and power cogeneration projects planned by M&G Chemicals and Guozhen Group are technologically advanced, economically feasible and environmentally friendly.

“Fuyang City will provide full support to biomass collection, site selection, and land acquisition with incentive policies,” said the city’s deputy mayor, Lu Shiren.