Eleven years after building a sugar factory in Zeitz, Saxony-Anhalt, Germany, Südzucker AG set another milestone by building a bioethanol plant in the region.
The main ingredient used to make bioethanol at the plant is wheat, but Südzucker can also make use of the byproducts that result from its sugar operation, along with other kinds of grain that exist in abundance around Zeitz.
The new plant can produce 260,000 cubic meters of bioethanol per year, which takes about 700,000 tons of grain and requires a cultivated area of about 100,000 hectares.

Bioethanol helps
Bioethanol is a readily available, clean fuel used as a fuel additive to make environmentally friendly gasoline for combustion engines. It can be made from fom grain, corn, some tubers, sugar beet, sugar cane or cellulose plants. Bioethanol is basically alcohol, resulting from a process of fermentation, distillation/rectification and dehydration.
Todays effective gasoline standard allows for up to five percent added bioethanol.
The standard also permits as much as 15 percent ethyl tertiary butyl ether (ETBE) – an octane improvement that can be made from ethanol. Both substances are excellent gasoline additives and have superb environmental properties.
The European Union is promoting the use of biofuels and other renewable fuels to help meet the EU's climate change commitments, and to create environmentally friendly, secure supplies of fuel from renewable energy sources.
Managed by its Leipzig office, ABB has been part of the Südzucker project since late March 2004.

New frontiers
For ABB, it is the first major Profibus-PA installation, and there are about 1,000 Profibus devices at Südzucker. In Zeitz, ABB automation experts used the new visualization screen and IndustrialIT 800xA Operations to connect to AC 800F controllers.
“We have supplied the bioethanol plant with cutting-edge process technology,” says ABB project manager Jürgen Heinze. “The very short duration of the project presented an additional challenge. In close cooperation with all participating ABB partners, however, we turned this challenge into a success.”
ABB technology installed in Zeitz is also employed at another location: Energy Center 3. ABB supplied Babcock-Hitachi Europe, based in Düsseldorf, with a process control system, instrumentation, MCC and the appertaining data lines.