The production of bioethanol to fuel our vehicles from beet or from cereals has got the wind in its sails. Will we take another step, tomorrow, in producing this biofuel from straw or from waste wood? The answer is yes. But from there to see a genuine oilfield of ‘green gold’ and job opportunities in Wallonia is a leap. A recent publication reviews the possible and the desirable as far as the subject goes.
From next year (2010), the 27 countries of the European Union should have incorporated 5.75% of biofuels into their traditional fuel use. Ten years later, in 2020, this proportion will have in theory climbed to 20%. That is the ambition of a 2003 European directive, aimed at both reducing European dependence on the classical sources of fuel – gas and petrol – and contributing to the fight against greenhouse gas emissions, responsible for climate upheavals.
The fruit of the fermentative bioconversion of sugars by micro-organisms (generally yeasts), bioethanol is, along with biodiesel, one of the biofuels – or better agro fuels – which is more often cited to replace (even if partially!) petrol in our vehicles. A pipe dream? It is not as certain as that. In Brazil the production of bioethanol based on sugar cane goes back several dozens of years. Mixed with petrol, this type of ‘green’ fuel already supplies millions of so called ‘flexi-fuel’ vehicles, in other words capable of being driven with variable quantities of bioethanol. Whilst less advanced, Europe is not being outdone. Since the adoption of the 2003 directive it has seen the flourishing of dozens of businesses specifically geared towards bioethanol production. Thus, in Belgium, BioWanze, close to Huy, is considered the spearhead of the modernisation of Wallonia’s agro-industrial field. As in the majority of European countries, the fabrication of bioethanol is here essentially carried out using starchy plants (cereals, for example) and saccharose plants (such as beet).
These two types of raw material supply so called ‘first generation’ biofuels, whose production processes have now been completely mastered. Sugar beet, for example, allows us to obtain a yield of 92 litres of bioethanol per ton (NB: better than sugar cane in South America), at the outcome of a long circuit that gets under way with the roots being washed and cut into sugar beet chips, is then extended by the fermentation of the ‘juice’ by carefully selected micro-organisms (most commonly the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae) and is completed by a distillation/drying out phase.
