M&G and TPG sign JV for new technology for ethanol plant

Gruppo Mossi and Ghisolfi (M&G), the Italian company behind the construction of the world’s first industrial second generation ethanol producing facility, has created a joint venture with TPG Capital and TPG Biotech to license the company’s Proesa technology, called Beta Renewables.

As part of a €250 million investment into Beta Renewables, the technology will be used in the 40 tonnes per year production plant that is scheduled to open at the end of the first half of 2012 in Crescentino, Italy.

The project broke ground in April this year and the foundations on the site have been laid and a number of fermenters already installed.

The Proesa technology is a new fermentation method that will convert sugars from cellulosic biomass into ethanol and other chemical products.

Proesa uses a variety of biomass and has ‘high efficiency in viscosity reduction enzymatic hydrolysis’, according to the company’s website. Through the process, C5 and C6 sugars are fermented simultaneously and energy is created through the burning of the lignin.

‘It has feedstock flexibility meaning it can take a range of feedstocks such as straw and giant reed (which will be the two feedstocks being used at the new M&G facility), as well as corn stover, dedicated energy crops and, in the case of our proposed plant in Brazil, bagasse and sugarcane,’ M&G’s marketing and business development executive vice president Dennis Leong told Biofuels International today.

M&G will build the Brazilian industrial scale cellulosic ethanol plant with biofuels company GraalBio Investimentos, and the development will open in 2013, the company also announced this week.

The plant will also use Proesa technology, which is able to be adapted into various biofuel environments.

‘You don’t add chemicals to the Proesa process so you can use standard equipment when producing,' Leong says.

For the Italian site, M&G has set up an agreement with an unnamed major oil producer for distribution of the fuel once production begins, Leong adds.