Bioethanol plant sees full operation next year

MANILA, Philippines - Green Future Innovations Inc. (GFII) is ramping up operations of its P6-billion bioethanol plant in Isabela to achieve full scale operations next year.

“We are ramping up to full operations,” GFII president and CEO Reynaldo F. Bantug told reporters.

The Isabela bioethanol and cogeneration project, which has a rated capacity of 200,000 liters per day, started operations last month.

Bantug said GFII will end the year with a capacity to process 2,400 metric tons of sugarcane per day or 80 percent of full capacity.

Bioethanol, also called ethanol fuel, is a light alcohol produced by fermenting starch or sugar from corn, sugarcane, cassava or nipa used as a substitute to gasoline.

GFII grows sugarcane in 11,000 hectare of idle and underdeveloped land for use as feedstock. Its infrastructure will produce enough bioethanol to displace 54 million liters of imported fossil fuel.

“We are not yet in our optimum level of sugarcane planting so we stretch our available feedstock to operate at an efficient level of around 80 percent,” Bantug said.

GFII is a joint venture between Japan’s Itochu Corp. and JGC Corp., the Philippine Bioethanol and Energy Investments Corp., and Taiwanese holding company GCO.

“We have not started selling for this year. Hopefully we could start selling at the latter part of this month or January,” Bantug said.