Raízen originally broke ground on the $US100 million “biomass-to-ethanol” expansion just over one year ago. The new facility converts biomass such as sugar cane bagasse and straw into 40 million liters per year of advanced, second generation cellulosic biofuel. It is also the first large-scale commercial implementation of Iogen Energy’s cellulosic ethanol technology, which Iogen developed and has extensively proven in its Ottawa demonstration facility.
(Iogen Energy is the name of the joint venture between Iogen and Raizen — and Raizen is itself is the $10B JV between Cosan and Shell)
“We finished construction on schedule, and said we expected a Q4 startup, and we’re on time,” Ziyad Rahme, SVP and General Manager for Iogen Energy, told the Digest. “We’ve had a short one-month ramp up, and started production and are making ethanol. Raizen right now have made 200,000 liters available and are selling cellulosic ethanol in Brazil. That’s also very exciting.”
“The start up went very well,” Rahme said. “There are always the first of kind things. But we are not hitting any significant hurdles, so far on the rate or yield side. What we are seeing is as per expectation, the pretreatment, hydrolysis and fermentation are all working as expected. Having said that there is always continuous improvement and fine tuning the process.”