Tonon Biomass Plant

Before going on this dialogue, I didn't know that biomass energy could be made of sugarcane. I thought that biomass only involved corn because that is the main use in the United States. I also did not see the point in burning our food for energy when some people did not have enough food to eat. Brazil, however, has so much excess land that could be used for biomass generation. I thought it was very interesting that the plant not only produced energy for the grid, but also ethanol and raw sugar. 

We toured the plant in a sort of reverse order, beginning with the industrial side of the operation involving extracting the crystal sugar, ethanol, and burning the excess sugarcane for energy. Then we went to the agricultural side where the sugarcane was grown and harvested. 

We began the industrial tour by seeing the machines that crush the sugarcane and extract the juice. The sugarcane plants went through 5 rounds of machinery (see left image below). The first round extracted 70% of the juice from the sugarcane plants while the next 4 rounds extracted the remaining 30% of the juice from the plants. They focused a lot on getting everything that they could out of the sugarcane plants. It was interesting to see the control room and how they monitored the machinery (see right image below). Similarly to most of the places we have visited, they had images on the machinery of the screen with the function instead of simply having words. I did not image the control screens to include images of the machinery, but after thinking about it it makes sense for them to depict the machinery in the clearest way possible. When we had the chance to touch the fully dried sugarcane, it still felt like it had a lot of moisture in it, however it tasted very dry (see last image below). 

 

We also visited the lab where they tested the process of creating ethanol to determine how much they were creating. On the way to the lab we saw huge containers of ethanol (see image below). They combined yeast with the juice/syrup from the sugarcane so that it would ferment and become ethanol. It was interesting to see the small scale model of the large process that the sugarcane went through to create the ethanol. 

After eating lunch, we took the bus to the sugarcane plantation, which was further than I expected from the industrial area. Paulo, the safety guru, cut some sugarcane for us from the field. It was much more tasty than the drier sugarcane. The machine that they used to extract the sugarcane was able to efficiently mostly extract the sugarcane and discard excess leaves. 

The entire plant was able to create 40 MW of energy from burning the sugarcane waste. The system used their own energy to sustain itself, so it ended up having a net energy production of 20 MW. It was interesting how at every step of the process they reused and conserved energy and resources as much as possible.