China gets energized over ethanol

Now China appears to want a trade deal that would allow it to sample – and perhaps help ultimately reproduce – Brazil’s success
with alcool, as ethanol is called in Portuguese. With an economy booming at a 10% growth rate, transforming the world’s most populated country from a nation of peasants into one of middle-class consumers, China’s dependency on oil and gasoline is growing untenable.

With the price of oil hovering at record levels, China is looking seriously at alternative fuel sources, and Brazil’s experience with ethanol is attracting serious notice in Beijing.

Indeed, China will need to import ethanol – at least initially – if it plans on fueling its automotive needs with anything other than a trickle of the bio-fuel. From 2000-05, courtesy of about a dozen plants, China developed a million tons per year of ethanol production capacity, which it plans to double by 2010, Liu said. But China’s gasoline consumption already is in the tens of millions of tons annually.

Liu estimated that by 2020, power generation by renewable energy will make up 10% of the total, with biomass fuels such as ethanol being only a portion of that.

Asia Times