great news!! lots of money being invested.

Malaysian Firm to Make Ethanol From Tree

(C) 2007 The Associated Press

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia - A Malaysian company is building what it says is the world's first plant to commercially produce ethanol from nipah palm trees, with the product aimed mainly for export to countries looking for alternatives to gasoline, its chairman said Saturday.

Pioneer Bio Industries Corp. Sdn. Bhd. said it is building the plant in northern Perak state to extract ethanol from the sap of the nipah tree, scientifically known as Nypa fruiticans and found in abundance in Malaysia's coastal areas.

Company chairman Badrul Shah Mohamad Noor said the company plans to build more than a dozen additional plants over the next five years. He said the technology was developed by 16 Malaysian scientists over the last five years.

Ethanol is produced as a bio-fuel in Brazil and Europe but is sourced from other raw products such as sugar cane, cassava, corn and sugar beet.

The first plant, costing 1.4 billion ringgit ($398 million), will have a capacity to process 140 million gallons of ethanol per year. It is expected to be operational at end-2008, Badrul Shah told reporters.

He said the Perak state government has awarded the company the rights to harvest nipah sap on 10,000 hectares of land, for which it has to pay 324 million ringgit ($92.2 million) a year.

"We plan to have up to 15 ethanol plants in Perak over the next five years," he said. "They will have a total capacity of 1.22 billion gallons a year with total investments of 14.4 billion ringgit ($4.1 billion)."
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Nipah palm trees are also found in neighboring Southeast Asian countries and the Pacific Islands.

Badrul Shah said Pioneer Bio Industries is owned by local businessmen. Their identity and the source of funding for the initial plant will be made known later, he said.

He said the company was seeking investments from within and outside the country for the future plants.

Malaysia, a net crude oil exporter, is promoting exports of bio-fuels such as palm oil and ethanol _ which are derived from renewable plant sources _ to diversify its range of exports, as importing countries struggle with high crude oil prices.

A small number of government-owned vehicles currently use bio-diesel, comprising mainly palm oil, but commercial sales have yet to start.

sure can use on our car...if cannot no point they invest so much money.
but this oil got POWER or not???? and CHEAP??

Ethanol burns better than normal petrol if anything. But cheap it won't be - Brazil can do it because they produce too much sugar cane anyway.

Interesting stuff though.

As I know, alcohol fuels have higher octane(usually over 100 RON) but is highly corrosive. Engines that runs on ethanol are usually mildly modified petrol engines.

Eventhough ethanol gives lower mileage, a pure ethanol engine can run on extremely high compression ratio to help its efficiency. But very hard to make engines that runs on pure methanol le, we have to modify them quite a bit and making engines that run on pure ethanol will make it hard for the companies here to produce ethanol to meet demands. Also can petrol engines withstand such pressure?

All right - they'd probably have it done in another 20 years, just in time when Malaysia runs out of natural gas.

but looks like not meant to be sold loacally

ethanol have 30% less energy content per unit volume compared to petrol.

So of course if car use pure ethanol, sure less power.

i believe alcohol has higher energy than petrol

Hey, at least we get the money.

for all i know it'll mean higher mileage if we use ethanol. as it burns better and faster thean petrol, it'll also be consumed even faster than petrol. or am i wrong?

But we won't be restricted by knock if we want to modify our engines. We don't have too worry about how much boost we could use if we wanna install a turbo.

err...i dun get you.....

I mean improve the country's economy a bit, export and stuff. Unless it doesn't work that way.
You know what I think, it is best to mix this with our biodiesel. So the demand for biodiesel can be decreased, making it easy to cope with demands.

This post has been edited by tunertoobe: Jan 20 2007, 03:19 PM

we are short of sugar. No way for our sugar for ethanol

well......unless they get profits like petronas....i doubt it will be a big income for malaysia