Beta Renewables and its partner Novozymes have officially opened the world’s largest advanced biofuels facility in Northern Italy outside the town of Crescentino. The plant will use 270,000 tons of arundo donax or ‘giant cane’ – a high-yielding energy crop that grows on marginal land as well as agricultural waste such as wheat and rice straw to produce as much as 20 million gallons of cellulosic ethanol per year. In the U.S. there is the Indian River BioEnergy Center in Florida which has recently begun producing at a commercial level, and in Mississippi there is the KiOR plant which is making cellulosic diesel however production needs significant growth to meet the renewable fuel standard.
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