Brazilians Want to Make Ethanol From Rice

According to ANBA: Rice growers from the state of Rio Grande do Sul, in Southern Brazil, are organizing themselves to enable the manufacturing of ethanol from rice. A document on the subject will be elaborated by the farmers, with the aid of the Secretariat for Production and Agroenergy of the Brazilian Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Supply, and forwarded to the president Dilma Rousseff. Farmers from the state are already willing to build six plants.

It all started at Vinema Multioleos Vegetais, a company based in the municipality of Camaqu? that makes oil from castor and sunflower seed. "We began doing research on the possibility of making ethanol from rice," says Vilson Neumann Machado, the project and development director at Vinema. The idea is to take advantage from the fact that rice is a successful culture in the state, considering that sugarcane does not find a proper environment in the state.

According to Machado, at present, there is only one sugarcane ethanol plant in Rio Grande do Sul, in the municipality of Porto Xavier. The output is roughly nine million litres per year, whereas the demand in the state is 1.35 billion litres. Vinema started doing tests in the field four years ago and arrived at the possibility of producing the biofuel from rice more specifically from broken rice not suited to be eaten and from grain sorghum, which is used for crop rotation in rice crops.

The idea gained the support of the Federation of Rice Growers Associations of Rio Grande do Sul (Federarroz), by means of the Association of Rice Growers of Camaqu?, and is now carried forward by the organization with support from the state government, the Rice Institute of Rio Grande do Sul (Irga), the Tempered Weather Unit of the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation (Embrapa), among others. According to Machado, the type of rice that will be used in ethanol production has a productivity rate of 250 50- kilogram bags per hectare. The project and development director at Vinema claims that currently, 14% of the rice delivered by the growers is not suitable for human consumption and could thus be used for making ethanol.

The biofuel from rice would also be a way to take advantage of the surplus rice production, whose productivity, according to Machado, grows by 1,000 kilograms every five years in the state. "There is no point in rice producers being highly technology-intensive and going bankrupt," says Machado. Brazil produces over 13 million tonnes of rice a year and consumes approximately 10 million tonnes.

Originally published by Info-Prod Strategic Business Information.

source: istockanalyst