InterAgro brings Bulgarian engineers to Zimnicea

Ioan Niculae, owner of InterAgro, has brought 38 Bulgarian engineers to the new bioethanol plant in Zimnicea (southern Romania), with the businessman specifying he did not find personnel qualified or interested in working in the town by the Danube. The company inaugurated the first bioethanol refinery in south-eastern Europe last week, an investment amounting to around 90 million euros.
“It is a specialised profession, which entails a lot of computer work, and we unfortunately did not find qualified Romanians willing to work in Zimnicea. We received over 400 CVs, but most were from over 50 year-olds, who have no idea how to use a computer, but also from young people, fresh out of college, who don’t even know the chemical formula of starch. We continue to recruit in Bucharest, Turnu Magurele and Alexandria,” explained Aurel Ispas, shareholder of Bio Energy Fuel, the company that operates InterAgro’s bioethanol refinery.
In addition to bioethanol, InterAgro also produces corn oil, fodder, and carbon dioxide, used in the chemical and food industry, with almost 90% of production to be exported. Company representatives expect the investment to be recouped in three to six years.
“Almost 90% of all that the InterAgro group produces is exported. We want to preserve the same percentage for the refinery. We are the only European producers with a 99.9% ethanol purity, above the EU standards, which secures us a competitive advantage (…),” Ispas added.
According to Niculae, the refinery holds stockpiles of corn that will allow it to function in the next five months, with costs amounting to around 12 million euros. Corn currently costs around 0.09 euros/kilo, while ethanol was quoted at 0.675 euros per litre on the stock exchange at the end of last week.
“We currently use 3.3 kilos of corn for the production of one litre of ethanol, of one kilo of fodder and of one litre of edible corn oil. We want to cut consumption to 3.1 or even 3 kilos,” explained Ispas. It now costs around 300 euros to produce one tonne of bioethanol, with the sale price amounting to 675 euros.
Niculae also wants the group’s chemical plants to be energy-independent by next summer, an investment set to amount to 100 million euros, targeting the construction of five cogeneration facilities that will have an overall capacity of around 110 MW, making it the largest private energy producer in Romania.