Blue agave growing in Australia, not Mexico, for biomass, not tequila

October 21, 2018 |

In Australia, about 3,000 plants of blue agave, the base ingredient for tequila, are now growing not in Mexico, but in Far North Queensland as part of a biomass refinery project to provide a sugar mill with power year-round. MSF Sugar has another 45,000 plants in the nursery and is planning on having 50,000 plants in the ground by November to use as feedstock for power generation at the nearby sugar mill which currently burns seasonal bagasse from sugar cane crushing. The trial crop will be ready for harvesting in 2022.

“At the moment we generate seven megawatts of power and we’re going to generate 24 megawatts of power, so it’s around four times as much power from the same amount of biomass,” MSF Sugar’s business development manager, Hywel Cook, told ABC.net. “Sugar cane is the most valuable part of what we have, but we needed something else. We came across agave and agave was really interesting for us because you could grow it on land which wasn’t suitable for sugar cane. It didn’t need irrigation, you got a huge amount of biomass from it, and you could also make ethanol from it, so you got two things from the one crop: fibre plus the ethanol.”

Category: Fuels

Thank you for visting the Digest.