Grand Projects on the Plains of Northern France

This month’s program on the challenges and opportunities of biofuels production was a great opportunity to get out there on the front line and to see what’s happening in this fast moving sector. Watch this video then you’ll have seen that we went to Pomacle-Bazancourt in northern France, one of the heartlands of biofuels production, to see a site where all those "industrially" grown grain crops and sugarbeet are processed into feedstocks for the food and drinks industry, and also turned into the bioethanol in E85 and E10.

Our guide was Futurol project manager Benoit Trémeau, who began the tour by suggesting we shoot from the top of one of the grain silos where the raw material is unloaded and stored. I have to say it smelt wonderful, like a big box of muesli. Benoit explained how the grain is graded and sorted, with the parts not suitable for food production used to make fuels.

The main focus of our visit was the newly built building that houses Futurol, the site of the French national second generation biofuels project. This pilot plant should be online and functioning now, allowing engineers to process, test and refine different feedstocks for advanced biofuels. At the entrance to the site a series of storage areas will be filled with the supply materials — when we were there we saw piles of poplar and straw — which are then broken down, cooked, brewed and fermented into fuels.

As with the other biofuels plant I blogged about earlier on Comment Visions, the Futurol project is more about the journey than the destination — that’s to say that the reported 100 million dollars spent on the eight-year research project is all about developing and marketing the process of turning lignocellulosic biomass into biofuels, and then hopefully licensing or selling that production technology to companies worldwide, rather than selling the product itself. The ethanol they do produce will be blended in with the first generation fuels and distributed to pumps in France.

Benoit is still sticking to the orignal plan which sets targets of developing a demonstration-scale plant by 2015 and a commercial-scale plant by 2016, which I have to admit I thought seemed rather optimistic, but good luck to them if they can do it.

We finished the day’s filming rather dusty and hot, and so were offered a glass of the ‘traditional local tipple’. Turns out, the local tipple is top quality champagne. Yes, they’ve been brewing and fermenting in this part of France for centuries, and from my experience they’re getting pretty good at it by now .