INTERVIEW - Kazakh Biofuel Pioneer Plans More Plants
Date: 01-Dec-06
Country: RUSSIA
Author: Robin Paxton
The privately-owned company, which opened a $100 million plant in northern Kazakhstan in August, will decide by mid-2007 where to build its second factory, executive director Yevgeny Sutyaginsky told Reuters.
"All our attention is on our current plant. We'll move onto the second project in the spring," Sutyaginsky said in a telephone interview.
Asked how many plants his company planned to build, he replied: "Three -- minimum".
Ethanol, mixed with gasoline to make motor fuel cheaper and more environmentally friendly, is becoming more popular among consumers as high crude oil and gasoline prices encourage the use of renewable alternatives.
Biohim, a joint venture between privately owned Russian group Titan and Kazakh firm Basko, can produce 57,000 tonnes a year of bioethanol at its existing plant in Taiynsha, a town 400 km north of the Kazakh capital Astana in the heart of the country's main wheat-growing region.
Sutyaginsky said the plant was on track to produce at full capacity in 2007. The second plant would have similar capacity, he said, though the company's expertise might make it cheaper to build than the first.
He said Biohim was considering building the plant either in the north of Kazakhstan, near the existing plant, or in the south, where it would run on maize.
"The potential for grain-growing in Kazakhstan is very large. There's a lot of potential land," he said.
WHEAT CROP
Biohim Co. has acquired about 200,000 hectares of land for its existing plant, which needs about 220,000 tonnes of wheat of any quality.
Kazakhstan's 2006 grain harvest is expected to be 18.5 million tonnes by bunker weight, or just over 16 million tonnes by clean weight, up from 13.8 million tonnes by clean weight in 2005.
Sutyaginsky said Biohim would export all of its bioethanol. Its main customers are in the European Union, China and Russia.
Titan -- the Russian partner in the Biohim joint venture -- said this month it planned to start building a bioethanol plant in the Siberian city of Omsk that would be three times bigger than its Kazakh predecessor.
If such plants are successful, say analysts, supply and demand patterns for grains could be altered significantly.
Andrei Sizov Sr., president of Moscow-based analysts SovEcon, earlier told the Kazakh Grains Forum that such a project in Omsk would demand 600,000 tonnes of wheat -- 24 percent of the annual harvest in the Omsk region.
"Omsk, currently an exporter to other regions of Russia, could hardly be expected to continue like that in the future," Sizov said.
Several other Russian companies have announced ambitious plans to produce fuel from grains, sugar and oilseeds.