The Anhui Guozhen Group and Chemtex have agreed to form a joint venture to realize a full-scale commercial plant for the production of cellulosic ethanol from agricultural residues. Clariant has granted a license for its sunliquid® cellulosic ethanol technology to the joint venture.
The project development and plant operation will be executed by the joint venture at a greenfield site in Fuyang city in the Anhui province, in the Yangtze-Huai River region in East China. It uses land, owned by the Anhui Guozhen Group, and existing infrastructure network in the surrounding. The annual plant production capacity is planned to be 50.000 tons of cellulosic ethanol, with an option to double the capacity in a second phase (50.000 tons in each phase). This makes it one of the largest in China, so far. The project execution is pending a final agreement of certain government contracts for the project.
The produced cellulosic ethanol will be used in the Chinese regional fuel market as blend into gasoline to fulfill the national blending mandate. Cellulosic ethanol produced with sunliquid® saves around 95 % of greenhouse gases compared to gasoline.
The sunliquid® process allows all lignocellulosic feedstocks to be converted at a commercially viable basis. After a chemical-free pre-treatment, a specially produced enzyme mixture hydrolyzes cellulose and hemicellulose chains to form sugar monomers. Optimized enzymes then simultaneously ferment all these sugars to ethanol which is purified with the help of adsorbers
