Six important facts to know about ethanol replacing sugar

Jun 27, 2017 Letters

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Dear Editor,
We need to understand the math of the situation when we look at ethnol as a replacement for sugar; at a yield of 26 tons of cane per acre and 2 tons sugar per acre @ US$480 US dollars per ton sugar, the monetary yield of sugar per acre is US$960 / acre/ year, so to make $10.4 million US we would need to have 10.4M/960=10,833 acres of cane land; but from this same acreagewhich is already under cane, were we to manufacture fuel grade ethanol at 10,833 acres x 26 TCA x 22 gal E x US$3/gal = US$18.6 million. So an earning of US$10,400,000 from 10,833 acres growing cane for sugar, compared to US$18.6 million if we grew cane to makeethanol fuel for the Guyana marketplace alone, at a 10% mixture, and a selling price of 3 US per gallon.
Now any person looking at this equation, would have to conclude that it might be worth the effort to investigate this further, and would legitimately be right to ask what is GuySuCo doing? Why is it advising the government so badly? And he/she would be absolutely right. Especially in view of the following additional facts
1. Guyana would not have to find US$10.4 Million per annum in foreign exchange to buy Gasoline.
2. Because the ethanol is being produced locally, the price it can sell at can be set at 3 dollars US per Gallon for GuySuCo.5.3 million gallons @ US$3/Gallon= US$15.9 million/year to help them.
3. For the factory to produce Ethanol, let’s say Enmore/LBI,it will be far less expensive to buy and operate, it will consist of just the mills, the fermentation tanks and the distillery and will use much less energy, therefore the process will be cheaper, in addition it entails much lesson going maintenance costs than a factory to produce Sugar and molasses.
4. High TC/TS which is our biggest problem now, will no longer be an issue with the stop and start nature of current operations due to shortage of labour, so the deterioration of cane sugar or sucrose which happens almost immediately after burning, will not affect Ethanol production, sugar cane biomass including trash does not deteriorate quickly for ethanol production, it can be in the punt for quite a while and not affect its ethanol yield.
5. Because distilling the cane juice to make ethanol is so much less energy hungry than making sugar, co-generation of electricity becomes a real possibility due to surplus bagasse.
6. In addition work is currently going on, with some success, to convert the sugar cane biomass or cellulose to alcohol, this can never happen in converting cellulose to sucrose but it means that the cellulose of the sugar cane stalk and leaves is expected to become more important in time to ethanol production, the Brazilians have already done it.
7. Finding finance for such “green projects”, in view of climate change, could be financed by many agencies/grant aid programs.
8. In time ethanol can power other things, in fact recently a government owned Brazilian Company has signed a 10 year agreement to operate an ethanol power generating plant for the Brazilian national grid. i.e.”On 19 January 2010, Brazil’s state-owned company Petrobras launched the world’s first ethanol-fired power plant. Situated in the city of Juiz de Fora, in the state of Minas Gerais, approximately 180km north of Rio de Janeiro, the plant generates electricity on a commercial scale using sugar cane-derived ethanol. The plant’s technology, engineering and field support was provided by General Electric (GE). The plant has an installed capacity of 87MW, which is enough to power a city of 150,000 inhabitants. It is connected to Brazil’s electricity grid and has power supply contracts for the next ten years”.
All of this technology is available today from our neighbor to the south, who wants us to give them access to the Atlantic Ocean, and I suspect that they would be only too happy to partner with us for that benefit. GuySuCo has never sent anyone to Brazil, or invited anyone from there to come here to advise us. They are advising the government to close estates, when we have not, in my opinion, explored all of the possibilities and alternatives.
These things are not done by mediocre men with no vision. And frankly if this is not diversification from sugar [sucrose] production, I wouldn’t know what is? I agree that we should not be just closing these estates, Wales has taught us a lot, we must phase in profitable enterprises more suitable to out conditions, as we are phasing out the sugar. Please do not misunderstand me, I am not offering this as a complete answer to our problem, but we must look at it more closely and we have not! We certainly can’t have GuySuCo executives in Parliament telling the Economic Services Committee, that this will destroy our rum industry. Furthermore work is going on in the US and Brazil to convert the cellulose in the sugarcane biomass to ethanol using enzymes, which can possibly double the amount of ethanol from one ton of cane in time. http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/ae493
Tony Vieira

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