Company Hopes to Tap into Sugar Cane, Sorghum for Fuel-Grade Ethanol

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November 27, 2013

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by James Palen (The Daily Transcript/San Diego Source) … Brawley-based California Ethanol + Power is bringing the matter closer to home.
The company has yet to build its first facility, but by possibly the first quarter of 2014, it looks to break ground on a facility it says can produce for California up to 66 million gallons per year of low-carbon, fuel-grade ethanol — but not with corn.
It instead plans to use sugar cane and sweet sorghum.
The process has long been used in Brazil. But according to California Ethanol + Power President and CEO David Rubenstein, the planned Imperial County facility would be capable of much more, plant for plant, than what’s seen in South America.
An uninterrupted growing season and the addition of electricity and biogas fuel production are a couple of factors in that, he said.
Britain-based Booker Tate Ltd., a consultant for CEP, pegged the Imperial Valley farmland as potentially 40 to 50 percent more productive than Brazil’s sugar cane acreage.
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The project entails building a multipurpose facility calculated to cost $669 million in private funding to build.
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Because the forage crops grown on the planned planting areas are exported in such large volumes to places such as Asia and the Middle East, the switch from forage crops to sugar cane and sorghum in those areas isn’t expected to have a great effect on livestock feed in the U.S. or California, Rubenstein said.
CEP said it will plant and harvest the sugar cane and sorghum itself, eliminating certain costs to farmers leasing land to the company, and contract with the farmers on a cost plus guaranteed profit basis.
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“One thing we try to tell our investors is to not think of it on a national scale,” Rubenstein said. “Right now, it’s a 10 percent mandatory blend of ethanol in our gasoline. California wants to reduce the carbon intensity of that fuel by 10 percent over a 10-year period.” READ MORE

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