February 26, 2014 13:14 CET 

Brazilian cellulosic ethanol producer GranBio, formerly known as GraalBio, will open one ethanol mill per year by 2020, thanks to BRL 4 billion (USD 1.708bn/EUR 1.243bn) investments in the biofuel sector, local magazine Exame said.

The first of the units will be the BRL-350-million plant in Sao Miguel dos Campos, northern Alagoas state, to come on stream by the end of March. 

The facility, dubbed Bioflex Agroindustrial, will be the first in Brazil to produce second-generation (2G) ethanol. It will be able to initially produce 82 million litres (18m gallons) per year. The locations and the value of the investments of the other plants are still not revealed, Exame underlined. However, GranBio's target is to hit a production of one billion liters of ethanol by 2020.