China considering banning corn ethanol

China may entirely switch to non-food materials such as cassava, sorgo and cellulose in producing ethanol fuel as a substitute for petroleum, a government official said over the weekend.

The country would approve no projects designed to produce ethanol fuel with food from now on, said an official of the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC), who asked that his name not be identified, at a seminar on China's fuel ethanol development in Beijing on Saturday.

With a famine only 50 years in their past, Chinese are wary about the dangers of using food for biofuel.

Concerns about the use of grains for fuel prompted the Chinese government to cap new ethanol production in December of last year.

Four companies are currently engaged in producing corn-based ethanol in China. They would be asked to switch to non-food materials gradually, according to the NDRC official.

The four enterprises in Jilin, Heilongjiang, Henan and Anhui have a combined production capacity of a million tons of corn-based ethanol per year.

China Oil and Food Corporation (COFCO), the country's largest oil and food importer and exporter, would focus on sorgo in the production of non-food-based ethanol fuel, said Yu Xubo, president of COFCO at the seminar.

COFCO, which owns the Heilongjiang enterprise and has a twenty-percent stake in the Anhui enterprise, aims to produce five million tons of ethanol fuel based on sorgo in the near future.

China has become one of the leading producers and consumer of ethanol fuel in the world after the United States, Brazil and European Union.

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