Tonon: Ethanol Plant

Today we visited an ethanol plant 3 hours away from Sao Paulo named Tonon. This plant produces 300,000 liters of ethanol a day, but it's capacity is a maximum of 450,000 liters of ethanol per day. The plant produces both ethanol and electricity. It produces up to 400 megawatts of electricity per day.

The plant has four parts to it. The first part of the plant that we visited was the extraction area. Then we moved to the evaporation portion. From there we went to the fermentation process area. The plant has 10 fermentation tanks. Yeast is used in the fermentation process to create ethanol. This yeast is used again in another fermentation cycle because after it ferments you get a wine. The wine is separated from the yeast through centrifuge. The substances go to a radiation tower and there the ethanol is separated from the water using different temperatures, also known as the distillation process/part of the plant. Once they separate the water from the ethanol they reuse the water to water the crops because the water is rich in nutrients. They produce 600,000 tons of sugar per day and 1,200 megawatt hours per day. The plant is completely self-sufficient in the sense that it runs off of the energy that it produces.

At the end of the trip, we went to a sugar cane field where they showed us how they harvest the sugar cane using two big trucks/pieces of machinery. One of the machines cuts the sugar cane stalks down while the other truck catches/collects the cut pieces of stalk. We were all given pieces of sugar cane stalk to bite on and have some of. The sugar cane juice was sweet but also tasted the same way that the plant smelled. After having walked around the ethanol plant for a few hours and smelling the potent sugar cane smell everywhere, the stalk tasted disgusting. 

This was definitely a place for chemical engineers since there was a lot of chemical processes going on at this plant which was rather disheartening for me as a chemical engineer because I would not like to work in a place like that. The plant smelled horrible, it was very dirty and the technology looked very outdated that the workers used in the little rooms scattered around the plant.