Indonesia Has Potential For Ethanol-Fuel Cars: GM
by Heru Andriyanto (Jakarta Globe) Indonesia might be a potential market for ethanol-fueled cars, following in the footsteps of other sugarcane-producing nations like Brazil that promote the alternative source to fossil fuel, a General Motors executive said.
“The key is the government policy that makes ethanol mandatory or at least ensures ethanol availability nationwide,” William Bertagni, GM Brazil’s executive director of engineering, said in an interview with the Jakarta Globe earlier this week.
“If Indonesia has sufficient infrastructure for ethanol distribution, we are more than ready to sell flex-fuel cars there or introduce this technology to Indonesia, like what we’ve been doing here in Brazil for decades,” he said.
…Still, any plan to create an ethanol industry from sugar would mean that Indonesia needs to produce more sugar cane than it consumes. Brazil, the world’s largest sugar producer, will ship 125,600 metric tons of sugar to Indonesia in the current season, Bloomberg reported on Friday, citing data from Williams Servicos Maritimos. To cover a shortfall Indonesia is set to import about 3 million tons in the 2012-13 season, the newswire reported, citing Green Pool Commodity Specialists, an Australian firm.
According to a 2011 biofuels report on Indonesia by the US Department of Agriculture’s Foreign Agricultural Service, 13 companies were producing industrial ethanol in Indonesia, with total capacity at 244 million liters as of 2010. While ethanol was mainly for industrial use, production as a fuel stopped in 2010 amid a dispute over pricing. In 2009 only 1.72 million liters of ethanol fuel was produced, compared to 350 million liters of biodiesel, data from the USDA report show. READ MORE and MORE (Advanced Biofuels USA)
