São Paulo – 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 Camaquã 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 Camaquã, 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. “There is a surplus of around 3 million,” adds Machado.
Vinema is the company that intends to open six rice ethanol plants, and the location for them has already been defined. The first one should be in the municipality of Cristal, the second in Dom Pedrito, the third in Alegrete or vicinities, the fourth in Cachoeira do Sul or surroundings, the fifth one in Santo Antônio da Patrulha, and the sixth in Capão do Leão. Apart from Santo Antônio da Patrulha, which is located along the coast, the other cities are in the south of the state, which is a rice-producing region. The company, however, is going to seek partners to invest in the plants, such as the National Development Bank (BNDES).
In the university
The Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) also maintains a project to encourage ethanol production from alternative sources, such as rice, cassava, sweet potato and saccharine sorghum. The initiative is of the Integrated Research, Teaching and Extension Hub, which already maintains an experimental station in the municipality of Arroio dos Ratos. According to the UFRGS professor Harold Ospina Patino, who participates in the project, current testing at the unit includes ethanol production from rice with shell, rice without shell and polished rice, to ascertain which variety produces the most ethanol.
The experiment, which should have zero environmental impact (the leftovers will be used in animal feed and as biofertilizers), will be passed on to growers as soon as it is finished. The idea, Patino explains, is for the farmers to produce, at micro plants, the ethanol that they will use in their passenger vehicles, in working the land or for sales. In 2012, the Brazilian market should see the launch of a tractor that may be fuelled with ethanol. The company Usinas Sociais Integradas donated a plant to the UFRGS project and may sell others to farmers.
*Translated by Gabriel Pomerancblum
