Absolut Distillers Inc. invests P500M in plant

LIAN, Batangas—Absolut Distillers Inc. (ADI) of the Lucio Tan Group is set to develop a sugar mill and cogeneration power plant that will complement its bioethanol facility here.

ADI chief operating officer Gerardo Tee told reporters that the company may invest at least P500 million in the project, which may take one year and six months to develop in an area near the company’s bioethanol plant.

The sugar mill’s crushing capacity is about 100,000 tons to 200,000 tons cane per day. The resulting cane juice will be used as raw material in ADI’s bioethanol facility.

The waste material from crushed cane will serve as feedstock in the cogeneration facility with a capacity of 3 to 4 megawatts, he said.

“If we get funding this year, we can develop it for one and a half years and be done around 2017,” Tee said.

Using sugarcane juice as feedstock in ADI’s bioethanol facility enables continuous operations despite the shrinking supply of molasses from sugarcane farms in Luzon, LT Group CFO and SVP Nestor Mendones.

Meanwhile, for the bioethanol facility, ADI has secured off-take contracts with oil firms Seaoil and Flying V. The bioethanol facility is expected to produce three million liters per month.

Tee said the bioethanol plant is the third part of the Lucio Tan Group’s “multi-million” investment in renewable energy.

The project is inside the distillery along with the biogas producer and the 2-megawatt solar power plant.

Ethanol is used in the gasoline blend and comes from agricultural crops such as sugar. The Biofuels Act of 2006 mandated a 10-percent ethanol blend in gasoline.

The company was established in 1990 under the company Absolut Chemicals Inc., which was engaged in the manufacture of ethyl alcohol and liquefied carbon dioxide as fermentation by-products used for producing soft drinks, among others.