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M&G To Build Chinese Biorefinery

by Marc S. Reisch
November 25, 2013 | A version of this story appeared in Volume 91, Issue 47

Italy’s Gruppo Mossi & Ghisolfi plans to build a $500 million biorefinery in China to make ethanol and the polyester raw material ethylene glycol from 1 million metric tons of biomass per year. The facility in Fuyang, Anhui province, to open in 2015, will be four times larger than M&G’s recently commissioned Crescentino, Italy-based biorefinery. To be built in a joint venture with minority partner Guozhen Group, a Chinese energy and real estate conglomerate, the Fuyang refinery will use Proesa technology from Beta Renewables, a joint venture partly owned by M&G, which is also a polyethylene terephthalate (PET) maker. M&G CEO Marco Ghisolfi says the company’s entry into China will position it to supply PET to firms, such as Coca-Cola, that have advanced the development of renewably sourced bottles. Lux Research analyst Andrew Soare says it will be a challenge for M&G to make glycol at competitive prices given the low-cost natural-gas-based ethylene glycol available in the U.S.

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