Sugar Cane

[MHC]

From Treehugger

Sugar Cane Waste to Replace Coal in Coal-Fired Power Plants?
by Brian Merchant, Brooklyn, New York on 11.23.09


Via Green Inc

Here's a promising project: Brazilian and Italian entrepreneurs are
investing $114 million in a plan to convert bagasse, a waste product
from sugar cane, into pellets that can be burned as fuel at your
average, run-of-the-mill coal plant. By next year, utilities around
the world will likely be getting thousands of megawatts of power from
sugar cane waste.

The company, called Brazil Pellet has already successfully tested the
technology in a pilot program. From Green Inc:

Brazilian Pellet plans to begin production in the third quarter of
2010 in its first plant in São Paulo, home to more than half the
production of Brazil's sugar cane industry -- the world's largest. By
2015, Brazil Pellet plans to reach 520,000 tons a year of pellet
production, an amount that would produce 2,420 gigawatts of energy.
Now, there will certainly be concerns about the emissions of such a
fuel, especially since they're being burned at coal plants. But the
company makes this point: "If you just let the bagasse decay it
releases methane, and that's 20 percent more dangerous to the ozone
layer than carbon dioxide,'' said Ivan Nuñez, a banker with the IDB
arranging the financing for Brazilian Pellet. "So, burning it instead
gives you carbon credits.''

The other, perhaps most intriguing aspect of the project is that
currently, sugar cane waste is just being dumped and treated as
garbage. Since the waste product already exists, it means creating the
pellets requires no resource-intensive crop watering , as must be done
with other biofuels. Brazilian Pellet will no doubt be a company to
watch in 2010.

Can aslo be seen at:

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2009/11/sugar-cane-waste-replace-coal.php?campaign=weekly_nl