John Myers Jr., Business Reporter

Jamaica Broilers' US$20 million (J$1.3 billion) ethanol dehydration plant is to come on stream a month later than expected, Senior Vice-President Christopher Levy said Wednesday.

Levy told the Financial Gleaner that construction was delayed due to problems with the Brazil-based contractor, Dedini Industrias de Base, the world's largest supplier of alcohol distillation plants.

Dedini, he said, "has been tardy in many respects, but I think we should finish by the end of June. Earlier in the project they were late with everything." He added that the plant was 95 per cent complete.

First privately owned

The new ethanol production plant, which is the first privately owned commercial facility being built in Jamaica, near Port Esquivel in Old Harbour, St. Catherine, is expected to convert some 60 million gallons of wet to hydrated ethanol.

The hydrous supply will be imported for drying from Brazil, and will be exported mainly into the United States, but could extend to other potential markets in Canada and the Caribbean where countries, like Jamaica, are also exploring the use of fuel-grade ethanol for motor vehicles.

Jamaica is aiming to replace as much as 10 per cent MTBE in gasolene with fuel-grade ethanol in the short term. This could increase to as much as 25 per cent, according to Energy Minister Phillip Paulwell, if feasibility studies being conducted now show that it could work.

Late last year the JBG inked a deal with Swiss-based Bauche Energy Company to supply about 50 million gallons of hydrated ethanol out of Brazil in the first year of operation. The JBG vice-president said on Tuesday that they were not searching for any more suppliers at this time.

The plant's one-month delay, Levy told the Financial Gleaner, would not affect supply commitments.

"We had this slack time projected, so it is not really a big issue in terms of our projections," he said.

The JBG is an agro-processing company that produces and processes poultry, fish and beef commercially in various pre-packaged options. It already has a track record in the energy sector as operator of a US$3 million cogeneration plant at Spring Village, St. Catherine, the excess from which it is in negotiations to sell into the national power grid.

With the new ethanol plant, the publicly-listed company is looking to boost profits from the huge market that exists for the biofuel, especially in the US.

john.myers@gleanerjm.com