LONDON: Britain’s first major bioethanol plant is set to be up and running around the middle of 2009 and should use more than one million tonnes of wheat per year, the head of UK biofuels firm Ensus said on Wednesday.
“We are currently planning to be operational by the middle of next year. Construction is proceeding very well at the moment,” Ensus chief executive Alwyn Hughes told Reuters in an interview.
Ensus, a start-up company, was acquired last year by two U.S. private equity funds, the Carlyle Group and Riverstone.
The plant, in Wilton, northeast England, is expected to be Europe’s largest biorefinery, producing around 400 million to 450 million litres of bioethanol a year as well as 350,000 tonnes of animal feed.
It will dwarf the largest current plant in the UK, a British Sugar facility in eastern England with an annual production capacity of about 70 million litres.
British Sugar is partnering BP and DuPont to build a bioethanol plant at Hull in eastern England with a capacity of about 420 million litres which is expected to enter commercial production in July 2010.
The two plants are expected to dominate Britain’s bioethanol production.
Hughes said European Parliament’s approval on Wednesday of a deal to cut greenhouse gas emissions was an important step forward for the biofuels industry.
The directive mandates that 10 percent of EU transport fuel should come from renewable sources by 2020.
“The targets for 2020 that this sets provides a stable framework for investment over the next decade,” he said.