Dedini SA Industrias de Base, a Brazilian maker of ethanol-production machinery, is developing systems that will process sweet sorghum into renewable fuel, as an alternative to the widely used used sugar cane.

The company is in talks with eight developers about buying a sorghum-processing mill it plans to build by 2013. It also expects to sign by April a contract to add equipment to handle the alternative feedstock at an existing cane mill, Jose Luiz Oliverio, vice president of technology and development at Piracicaba-based Dedini, said in a telephone interview yesterday.

Sorghum can be harvested in the first three months of the year, the rainy season when sugar-cane harvesting typically shuts down, ethanol supplies wane and prices surge.

“There’s growing interest among cane mills to” process “sweet sorghum,” Oliverio said. “All the big groups are interested in doing this.” Refiners want to plant sorghum in October and harvest it in the rainy months of February and March.

Installing sorghum-processing machinery at a cane mill would let it operate during the inter-harvest season. “The idea is not to have parallel equipment, but changes you can make in a few hours,” Oliverio said.

Dedini has been testing sorghum since 2008 as a source of ethanol, he said. Yields are currently about a quarter of what can be produced from cane, but will likely improve as manufacturing equipment is fine-tuned.

Prices of anhydrous ethanol, which is mixed 25 percent with gasoline in Brazil, reached an all-time high of 2.73 reais ($1.68) a liter on April 20, according to Piracicaba-based research institute Centro de Estudos Avancados em Economia Aplicada.

source: bloomberg

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