InfraStructures - June/July 2016 - Scania Trucks Use 2nd Generation Ethanol Manufactured with Clariant’s sunliquid® Technology

Scania Trucks Use 2^nd Generation Ethanol Manufactured with Clariant’s sunliquid^® Technology

Clariant and Scania are celebrating the results and the opportunities generated by the partnership established last year, which involved an investment in sustainable technologies for cargo transportation.

In mid-2015, Clariant acquired 3 Scania P 270 model 4x2 trucks, which run on ethanol and are the first of their kind to be sold by Scania in Latin America. The Ecotrucks, as they are called, transport ISO tanks with a 25,000 l capacity for chemical products to the fleet of highway trucks, which then deliver the products to Clariant’s customers. The 3 Scania P 270 tractor units work 24/7 in 4 shifts. They are used to transport chemical products at Clariant’s plant in Suzano, in the state of São Paulo, which is the company’s largest industrial complex in Latin America. After nearly a year of using the Ecotrucks, Clariant can verify a reduction in CO₂ emissions by approximately 90% compared to the diesel engines that were used before.

The ethanol fuel used by the Scania trucks contains the Master Batch ED 95 additive produced by Clariant Brasil. The fact that it is produced locally was essential to the viability of the project as this optimizes costs and logistics. The additive allows engines designed to run on diesel to run on hydrous ethanol because it adjusts the characteristics of the fuel to the engines’ requirements in order to make the vehicle run well.

As the second phase of this project, Clariant started using second-generation ethanol as part of the fuel to operate the Ecotrucks. This ethanol is manufactured from sugar cane bagasse using the innovative sunliquid® technology. “Add value with sustainability is one of Clariant’s strategic pillars. The company’s initiative with the Ecotruck project supports its environmental goals and reinforces our approach to sustainability, including verifying the positive results of the solutions we provide to the biofuel market, especially the innovative sunliquid technology,” states Paulo Itapura, head of Sustainability & Regulatory Affairs for Clariant Latin America.

Performance tests verify the performance of the sunliquid technology
Sunliquid technology represents an innovative biotechnological process used for the manufacture of cellulosic ethanol from agricultural waste such as wheat straw, corncob residue or sugar cane bagasse. Clariant offers the international fuel industry an integrated technology solution, from the pre-treatment of the biomass to the final cellulosic ethanol product. During the process, the pre-treatment without chemicals is highly efficient. Clariant developed enzymes that are highly specific to the raw material in order to break down cellulose and hemicellulose into fermentable sugars based on a stable process and a high yield. The enzyme production within the process increases flexibility and significantly reduces production costs. In the next stage, a fermenting agent allows the C5 and C6 sugars to be converted into ethanol, thus increasing the production of the fuel by around 50%.

Since July 2012, the company has been operating a pre-commercial plant in Straubing, Germany, producing up to 900 t of cellulosic ethanol from approximately 4,000 t of raw material. At that unit, over 40 containers of sugar cane bagasse from Brazil were processed to manufacture some of the fuel that is already being used in the Ecotrucks at the Suzano plant. “Today in Brazil, we are demonstrating the commercial use of the cellulosic ethanol fuel, using one of the least CO2-producing vehicles available: the Scania trucks,” comments Martin Mitchell, Business Development manager for the Americas. “We conducted several tests to validate the technical and economic viability of the sunliquid technology, which is already commercially available in Brazil. We verified, once again, that producing the enzymes at the plant itself, in a manner integrated with the overall process and specific to sugar cane bagasse, represents the best competitive cost,” he states. The sunliquid technology won the 2015 German Innovation Prize for Climate and Environment.

Recent history of Scania’s work with ethanol in Brazil
Renowned as a provider of ethanol solutions in Europe, Scania announced that it had begun testing ethanol-fueled buses in Brazil in 2007. After a demo period in São Paulo, the company announced the first sales of ethanol-fueled buses in Brazil. Viação Metropolitana, currently MobiBrasil, and Tupi Transportes, purchased 50 and 10 buses respectively, all of which would be used for public transportation. In October 2011, during the Fenatran convention, Scania launched the first ethanol-fueled large truck for Latin America. Scania is a global provider of sustainable solutions and offers products that run on alternative fuels such as biogas, natural gas, liquefied natural gas, biodiesel, bioethanol, hybrid diesel and electricity, as well as products that utilize hybrid ultracapacitors, a combination of ethanol and battery power, and hybrid diesel and biodiesel technology that meet Euro 6 standards. In Brazil, along with ethanol-fueled vehicles, the brand offers trolleybus chassis and busses that run on biomethane/GNV.

Source: Clariant International Ltd.

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