The ethanol craze is arriving in China. The Chinese government is investing in searching the crop that will satisfy, at least partially, China's needs for fuels. The best candidates so far are sorghum and tapioca. The country is currently the world's third largest ethanol producer, although far behind numbers 1 and 2, Brazil and the US. The current crop of choice is corn and it's claimed that it's the reason behind a recent 30 percent rise of the price of grains in China.

Therefore, the government has given instructions to stop producing ethanol from grains and switch to sorghum and tapioca but also rapeseed and sugarcane. Current targets for 2010 are 3.8 million tons of biodiesel and 6 million tons of ethanol. However, these numbers are far short from the country's needs and government campaigns to reduce pollution.

Someone is seeing a business here. According to Marcia Doner, economy advisor at the Brazilian embassy in Beijing, "China's population is gigantic and all the agricultural land is already being used. They will need to import huge quantities of ethanol". However, importing ethanol isn't the only option they have and they are currently investing in cellullosic ethanol, as Abdolreza Abbasian from FAO said.

Related:

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• Range Fuels building the Nation's First Commercial Cellulosic Ethanol Plant
• Tokyo stations selling bio-ETBE shipped from France
• Ethanol 2020, a new global study, sees three generations of biofuels

[Source: Europa Press via Econoticias]

As Sam noted earlier today, China is putting the foot down on domestic coal-to-liquid energy projects. While generating energy from biomass sources is the one option China will consider moving forward, ethanol from grains will not be the biofuel of choice.

"The rapid development of grain-based ethanol biofuels has resulted in commodity price pressures in non-developed nations," the state-owned Beijing Youth Daily paper said, according to Forbes. The reason is that China's grains should be used to feed the people, not to make energy. Cellulosic ethanol is A-OK, though.

The Beijing Youth Daily says that domestic ethanol production in China was 1.54 million tons in 2006, 850,000 tons of that from corn.

[Source: Forbe]

While it's been exporting heaps of plastic toys and cheap clothing, China has also recently become a big player in the international ethanol market. China will export at least an estimated 500,000+ tons this year (about 11,000 barrels a day), according to Reuters. The exports may even reach over 900,000 tons this year, up from about nothing last year. Most of this ethanol is sent to the United States. Two factors may influence the boom: the fact that China needs to import cassava to use as biomass and the continuing ethanol plant boom in the U.S.

The Chinese government is playing a large role in building ethanol plants in China, since there were only four until 2005. One Beijing-based international house trader said there are a few thousand ethanol producers in China today. The government is also encouraging producers to use non-grain crops like cassava as a feedstock. One company, China Songyuan Ji'an Biochemical Sales Co. Ltd., told Reuters it would export all of its ethanol output - 300,000 tons - this year.

Related:

• China will begin gassing up with cassava in 2007
• Ethanol-powered buses being tested around the world

[Source: Reuters]

Sure, China is playing global politics to ensure it will have a supply of oil as its population continues to grow and cars become more and more prevalent, but it is not neglecting home-grown biofuel made from the cassava plant.  The cassava-based ethanol will be used in cars in the southern region Guangxi starting in late 2007, state media reported on Friday. Ethanol production plants with a combined capacity of 1 millions tons a year will be built to produce the biofuel. Cassava (which some readers might have eaten as tapioca or under the name yuca) is a plant harvested in tropical and subtropical regions. China is already the third-largest ethanol producer in the world, mostly made from wheat and corn.

[Source: Engineering News via Renewable Energy Access]