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Petrobras Invests in Cellulosic Ethanol 03/15/07 3:22:31 PM
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SAO PAULO (Dow Jones)--Brazil's state-run oil company Petrobras (PBR) will be "going green" this year by expanding its investments into cellulosic biomass technologies, a company official said Thursday.
Silas Oliva Filho, the Ethanol and Oxygenates Manager for Petrobras, said the company plans to install a pilot plant to test new-generation cellulosic technology as early as May in Rio de Janeiro, the company's national headquarters.
No investment amount was disclosed.
Cellulosic technology is considered the premier clean energy of the future. The technology uses a plant's bacteria to convert the plant's hard, fibrous content into starches that can be fermented by other bacteria to produce ethanol.
In Brazil, Petrobras experiments with sugarcane bagasse. In the U.S., government officials are talking about special prairie grasses known as switchgrass.
Economic and geopolitical factors such as high oil prices and environmental concerns have been prompting policy makers to promote renewable energy. In Brazil so far, that renewable fuel of choice is ethanol, a derivative of sugarcane.
For the scientific community, recent advances into metabolic engineering are generating considerable excitement, but the full potential of biofuel production from cellulosic material is generally 10 to 15 years away, according to a Massachusetts of Technology chemical engineer Gregory Stephanopolous, whose perspective on cellulosic tech was published last month in Science magazine.
Others, like Filho, put cellulosic technology within economic viability by as soon as 2012.
Sugarcane is composed of roughly one-third sugar, one-third bagasse or the remaining sugarcane fiber after cane stalks are crushed, and one-third leaf cover. If Brazil could turn the leaves and bagasse into biofuel, the country could theoretically double its ethanol output.
Brazil produces some 85 tons of sugarcane per hectare. Some of that cane gets crushed for sugar, the rest is turned to ethanol. But cellulosic technology would permit the waste from sugar production to be used to make fuel without having to cut back on overall sugar production. As it stands now, the more ethanol Brazil makes from the sugarcane plant, the less sugar it makes.
"You can use cell tech with almost any type of biomass, but we are mainly focussing on sugarcane waste because of the abundance of the material here in Brazil," Filho said.
Filho said that Petrobras should have an industrial scale pilot plant up and running in Rio de Janeiro sometime in 2008 in order to test the technology.
The company has three patents on ethanol production from cellulose.
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