Holden backs Australia's first commercial ethanol plant
AAP
A new company has been formed to prepare for commercial production of ethanol from household rubbish for use in Australian cars.
Backed by car maker Holden, Flex Ethanol Australia will build Australia's first commercially viable ethanol plant in Victoria.
Holden chairman and managing director Mike Devereux said the new company would take the project to the next stage of commercialisation.
It will ultimately be capable of turning up to one million tonnes of household rubbish and building waste into more than 200 million litres of ethanol each year.
The ethanol could then be used in a range of fuels, including E85, a mixture of up to 85 per cent ethanol and 15 per cent regular petrol that is already on sale in Australia.
"Our vision is that this technology, and the shift towards ethanol-based fuel, in time, could cut Australia's dependence on petrol by up to 30 per cent and make a major contribution to sustainable motoring and greenhouse gas reduction," Mr Devereux told business leaders in Melbourne on Wednesday.
One of Flex Ethanol Australia's first projects will be a trial at a facility in the US to test the suitability of Australian household waste for ethanol production.
Comments on this article
Biofuel from sugar cane waste, sub-arid region sunflowers!
Rubbish! Fair enough, but how obsolete can our old Al K Hall habits get? Ethanol, when Australia's trucks crave diesel? And when Sundiesel's German patents are cheap because of $A - Euro ratio? Yes, diesel, from any cellulose source, including the uneatable, can be made precisely to specification. Fair suck of the Wiggle-bd. Google Sundiesel.
Synthetic fuel does not have to mean biofuel
We will certainly have to shift away from fossil hydrocarbons, and the transition is quite likely to require synthetic hydrocarbons. However, even to meet the 30% quoted from grain would require more farmland than a hungry world can afford. And probably more subsidy than the taxpayer can afford.
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The carbon needs to be drawn directly from the air and the hydrogen needs to be produced from nonfossil, probably nuclear energy. However both processes require major research and development that our leaders have not been investing.