PREMIER Anna Bligh has labelled the proposed $400million sugar/ethanol/power generation factory as a possible benchmark for future projects throughout North Queensland during a visit to the region last Friday.
Ms Bligh took time out of her busy schedule to visit the proposed site at Como Road south of Ingham with North Queensland Bio-Energy Corporation Limited (NQBE) project implementation manager Doug Kingston.
The facility is set to incorporate state-of-the-art milling, distillation, and co-generation technology and is targeted to be operational in 2012.
Ms Bligh said the project displayed huge potential.
"It's great to be able to be here to have a look at the land because it gives you a real sense of how much land and opportunity there is here," she said.
"The exciting thing here is not only the production of biofuel, but putting energy back into the electrical grid.
"This could well become a model for other major regional centres in North Queensland."
The factory, designed on similar lines to existing plants in Brazil, India and Thailand, is due to produce about 335,000 tonnes of sugar annually, have a flexible distillery capacity of between 90,000 and 250,000 litres of ethanol per day, and generate between 75-85MW of renewable green power.
Ms Bligh said the future of the industry was looking bright.
"What we have here is a really exciting project, and I think Queensland and North Queensland has a big future in biofuels in particular," she said.
"We are one of the great sugarcane producing countries on earth and there is an increasing push into biodiesel and biofuel.
"My recent trade mission to the United States elicited a lot of interest from some major companies about working with research institutes and companies here in the biofuel space.
"I want to make sure that North Queensland and regional Queensland get a very big slice of that action.
"There are always regulatory hurdles that have to be managed in these sorts of endeavours and I think the proponents understand that.
"We're working very closely with them and we believe there is a viable way through, but we will have to wait until we get the material from them before final judgments can be made."
The visit from the Premier comes after 3D images of the factory were released by NQBE recently.
