Shandong Firm Finishes Coal-to-Ethanol Project

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Researched by Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas)--Shandong Yankuang Guohong Chemicals Company (Guohong Chemicals) (Jining City, Shandong Province) has finished a 500,000-ton-per-annum (TPA) coal-to-ethanol project and plans to expand capacity even further. Guohong Chemicals put the converters into operation at the end of December 2007.

The equipment consumes several million tons of high-sulfur coal every year, reducing more than 40,000 tons of sulfur dioxide emissions. Guohong Chemicals claims it to be the world's first set to take high-sulfur coal as raw material. The company can convert coal into ethanol with purity of up to 99.999%. From the conversion, the company can also extract argon, liquefied oxygen and more than 20,000 tons of sulfur every year.

Yanzhou City, where the factory is located, has a deposit of up to 1 billion tons of high-sulfur coal. The rich resource was not fully exploited because of China's determination to reduce emissions and the high cost of desulfurization.

The project, in which the company has invested $299.6 million and spent 25 months, is one of Shandong's three key coal-chemical parks.

According to plans and the finished environmental impact report, Guohong Chemicals will build a 1 million-TPA ethanol project, a 300,000-TPA polypropylene project and a 430,000-TPA vinyl acetate project. Construction of the projects is expected to begin soon and could be finished before 2010.

Yankuang Group (Jining City, Shandong Province), Guohong Chemicals' parent company, has invested more than $2.7 billion since 2001 in a 300,000-TPA acetic acid project, a 1 million-TPA methanol project, a 600,000-TPA synthesis ammonia project, a 2 million-TPA coke project and several other chemical projects.

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