A fully-integrated bioethanol plant to be built in the Australian state of Queensland will produce the lowest-cost bioethanol worldwide, the developer of the project claims.
The Pentland Bio-Energy Project will be located on 66,152 hectares (163,500 acres) near the small town of Pentland. The company behind the scheme, Renewable Developments Australia Pty Ltd (RDA), is looking to start construction in June 2016 and complete it in about 25 months, the North Queensland Register reported. The plant is expected to produce 250 million litres (66 million gallons) of fuel-grade bioethanol in its first year of operation and reach its expected annual output of 344 million litres in the second year.
Tony D’Alessandro, RDA managing director, was cited as telling a local forum that the company has already lined up 20 investors for the project, including a US Fortune 100 company that will buy the plant’s bioethanol for at least 15 years.
The feedstock will come from 19,100 hectares at the site, which will be used for the growing of sugarcane and sorghum.
The project is scalable and the site’s capacity can be boosted to over 1 billion litres of bioethanol. D’Alessandro has said that construction of a second plant of the same size will start as soon as the first one has been commissioned.
According to him the only obstacle faced by the project is access to sufficient amount of water, but the company was working with government to address it.
Provided by SeeNews exclusively for Essentica.
