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Chinese ethanol consumption growth: an interview with Michael Mao

Posted by on 10 December 2018
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Michael Mao is a Senior Energy Analyst and biofuels specialist at Sublime China Information, an intelligence provider for Chinese commodity markets. We caught up with him at the World Ethanol & Biofuels conference to discuss China’s impending E10 blend mandate, trade tensions with the US, and the outlook for cellulosic ethanol production.

China has announced that it’s going to implement an E10 blend mandate by the year 2020. In your opinion is that achievable? How much of the ethanol required for it will come from domestic sources, and how much of it will have to be imported?

Actually I have to tell you this. China promoted E10 gasoline, but E10 gasoline doesn’t mean it needs to achieve a 10% blending rate. So China may promote E10 gasoline on a nationwide scale, but the blending rate may reach about 9% or 8% in the end, because there are many places that don’t fit for E10 gasoline, like Tibet, the plateaus, and the deserts. All those areas and the wild rural areas in China seem not fit for E10 gasoline.

So is the Chinese state leaving it up to the individual provinces to decide to what extent they’re going to follow E10? How does it work?

Yes. And in our estimation the promotion will be mostly implemented in the developed areas, like North China, East China and South China. Including the already covered region of North East China, China will cover all the developed regions. That will bring us about 8 million tonnes of fuel ethanol consumption by 2020, and 11 – 12 million tonnes by 2025. The production on the other hand cannot catch up with this growth. This consumption is scaling too fast, and the domestic production cannot catch up with it, so the rest will be filled by imports. That gives us potential import room for fuel ethanol. By 2020 it might be 2 million tonnes, and later it will gradually decrease instead of increase, but it will decrease because the capacity will gradually transfer over to production, and China will eventually build its ethanol production basically on its domestically produced sources.

If we focus on the short term then, on 2020 directly after E10 is implemented. China is going to be looking for huge amounts of imports from elsewhere in the world, and typically we’d expect that to come from the US, but of course at the moment we have trade tensions – I think there’s a tariff of 75% on US ethanol – so how is that going to play in to all of this? Will it make it more difficult for China to implement E10?

Yes, actually, we believe in the short term – that means by 2020, which is also the deadline of the national promotion project from the government. By 2020 China cannot afford that huge volume in the fuel ethanol consumption growth. So China must import a huge volume from the international market, and that leads us to the US origin ethanol, because they might be the only one who is capable of supplying this huge volume to one specific country. But with the trade war or the trade conflict, that tariff banned most of the import potential from the US to China. So we believe without the support from US origin ethanol, China cannot achieve the full accomplishment of E10 coverage nationwide.

And as China does look to step up its own domestic production, they don’t necessarily have as much experience of biofuels production as perhaps elsewhere in the world – for instance the US. To what extent will China cooperate with other countries and with international companies to boost its ethanol production?

Yes, actually China has issued several policies to allow foreign companies to build their own plants, or invest in China to build fuel ethanol plants in the four free trading zones in China, but we believe China is capable of building their own plants right now, but from the technology China still needs strong support from the other countries like the US, Thailand and Brazil, all those countries may give strong support to China’s E10 promotion in the future.

And one of the things that’s been remarkable about China’s energy transformation in recent decades is how far they were able to bring the costs of solar power generation down. Do you think it’s possible that China may be able to do the same thing for cellulosic ethanol, given that cost is the big factor inhibiting the growth of cellulosic ethanol at the moment.

Yes, actually, last August, China sought council in an extra-review meeting. They have issued the implementationroute map for fuel ethanol in the medium to long future. In this route map, cellulosic ethanol is designated as the future of this industry. But you know from the cost, from economic efficiency, and from all the profitability side, cellulosic ethanol is not very good for the current massive production in China. Actually the only two cellulosic production plants in China have shut down because the cost is too high, and the specificity has stopped. So in the short term we can see that cellulosic ethanol will mainly be a topic on the experimentation side and the demonstration side. It cannot be implemented on a massive scale. But I believe in the long term – from 2025-2035 – in this decade China will put their major focus on cellulosic ethanol, just like synthetic ethanol from coal, as the future of ethanol supply in China.

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