Big trio to build £200m UK biofuels plant

London -- BP, Associated British Foods – owner of British Sugar – and DuPont are investing £200 million to establish a “world-scale” bioethanol plant on BP’s chemicals site at Saltend, Hull. The plan also includes establishing a pilot biobutanol unit on the same site, BP said 26 June.

Due for startup in late 2009, the bioethanol plant will have a capacity of 420 million litres/year from wheat feedstock. BP and British Sugar will each hold 45% in the plant, with the remaining 10% to be held by DuPont. The product will be used as petrol biocomponents, which will be needed to help the UK meet its 2010 Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation.

Front-end engineering and design work has already commenced, with Aker Kvaerner leading the project and a joint venture partner Praj providing technology support.

The partners aim to sign up grain trader Frontier Agriculture to supply locally grown wheat feedstocks and co-product marketing company AB Agri to handle certain byproduct from the bioethanol process.

The Hull site is also the preferred location for a planned biobutanol demonstration plant, to be funded and owned equally by BP and DuPont. This, said BP, could produce around 20,000 litres/yr of biobutanol from a wide variety of feedstocks.

Last year, BP and DuPont and British Sugar launched a project to convert a Britsh Sugar ethanol fermentation facility to produce biobutanol. The unit at Wissington, Norfolk was to have had a capacity of 30ktpa and be jointly owned by the three companies.

But, said a BP spokesman, these plans were scrapped because the ABE (acetone, butanol, ethanol)process being used at Wissington has been superceded by second generation technology. The partners, he added, have also been able to source biobutanol to meet their R&D and testing requirements from a previously mothballed plant, owned by a separate company in China.

“Over the last year, we have accelerated the commercial development of biobutanol,” said John Ranieri, head of DuPont Biofuels. “The demonstration facility, which will begin operation in early 2009, will develop the processing parameters and further advance the commercial deployment of our new technology."

While biofuels today represent less than 2% of global transportation fuels, projections show that they could become 20-30 % of the transport fuel mix in the key markets of Europe and North America.

Biobutanol’s low vapour pressure and its tolerance to water contamination in gasoline blends facilitate its use in existing gasoline supply and distribution channels. It can be blended into gasoline at larger concentrations than existing biofuels, without the need to retrofit vehicles, and offers better fuel economy than gasoline-ethanol blends.