With just a few weeks to go before the Congo distillery comes on stream at the Saris site, teams from head office visited the Cristanol distillery on Tuesday 3 December to familiarise themselves with this new activity.
Cristanol belongs to the Cristal Union group, which is a union of agricultural cooperatives producing Daddy sugar and ethanol. The site has a production capacity of 280,000 tonnes of ethanol, including 120,000 tonnes produced from beet and 160,000 tonnes from wheat. Within the Pomacle/Bazancourt agro-industrial cluster, there is a real synergy between the sugar factory and the distillery, as well as with all the cluster’s manufacturers (ADMChamtor / Givaudan / ARD Research Centre / Air Liquide, etc.). In particular, the site recovers water from the sugar refinery and sugar substrates to produce ethanol.
The ethanol produced meets the needs of various markets in Europe: biofuels, pharmaceuticals, detergents, foodstuffs, cosmetics and perfumes. Cristal Union aims to position itself as a leader in decarbonisation, with a target of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 35% by 2030, saving 265,000 tonnes of CO2. To achieve this objective, the group is investing massively in its sites.
After the tour, the head office team had lunch in a restaurant with its own microbrewery, where they learned about the beer-making process.
