China kicked off on Saturday the construction of its largest project to produce alcohol fuel from grains in Jilin City of northeastern Jilin Province.

Costing 2.89 billion yuan (US$348 million), the project is expected to consume 1.92 million tons of corn to produce 600,000 tons of alcohol fuel annually upon its final completion in 2003.

The project, a pilot program in developing new energy resources, is of strategic significance for China to adjust its energy resources structure and develop new resources to replace petroleum, said Guo Yinglan, a professor with the Dongbei (northeast China) Normal University, who has been engaged in research on automobile fuel for more than 20 years.

China has tried to expand use of new energy resources to substitute traditional ones in recent years for both economic and environmental purposes.

The Jilin project will consist of nine production facilities including an alcohol production line, a refined corn oil production workshop and an enzyme workshop. It is jointly funded by the China National Petroleum Corporation, Jilin Grain (Group) Co. Ltd. and the China Resources (Holdings) Company Ltd.

Apart from alcohol fuel, the project can also produce a series of downstream products such as 45,000 tons of corn oil, 175,000 cubic meters of hollow bricks and 183,000 tons of materials for road building.

Grain alcohol can be used as a kind of new automobile fuel by mixing it with gasoline. This kind of mixture can help reduce air pollution remarkably and has been widely used in some American and European countries for nearly 20 years.

The development of alcohol fuel is a new industry in China and so far, only a few provinces, including Heilongjiang and Jilin, have been chosen by the State to carry out pilot production.

Heilongjiang Province, in northeast China, produced 220,000 tons of grain alcohol last year, a portion of which was exported to Japan, the Republic of Korea and other countries.

Professor Guo Yinglan said that alcohol fuel will play a key role in improving the environment quality since gasoline mixed with grain alcohol can be fully burnt and it does not produce substances harmful to the human body.

Moreover, using grain alcohol can save energy resources and consume extra grain, said Guo.

Jilin Province is one of the major commodity grain producers in China, with its corn output standing at 15.36 million tons annually, ranking first in the country for years.

Experts said that the Jilin alcohol fuel project only consumes one-eighth of the province's annual corn output and will not affect the grain supply.

(Xinhua News Agency 09/23/2001)