Vinex Etil builds a €5.8m bioenergy plant in Lukićevo near Zrenjanin

(Photo: Patrik Jech/shutterstock.com)

The company Vinex Etil plans to build a bioenergy plant in Lukićevo near Zrenjanin. This biogas plant will have a capacity of 2 megawatts and the value of the investment is about €5.8 million, says the website of the City of Zrenjanin.

Vinex Etil was founded in 1999 in Užice as a company that dealt exclusively with the production and distribution of wine and other spirits. Then in 2007 it opened a plant for production of ethyl alcohol in Bajina Bašta.

“The company strategy in the next phase was to combine the production of ethyl alcohol with cattle breeding, by using spent malt grains in their feed”, says the Vinex Etil web site. “As a result, Vinex Etil bought land in 2012 and some buildings in Lukićevo near Zrenjanin to realise this idea. The project required substantial construction works and completely new buildings to house a base herd of milking cows. The distillery itself was moved virtually intact to the new environment which was a particular construction undertaking.”

The director of the company’s cattle farming division, Slobodan Serdar, says the farm now has 350 head of cattle, and plans to expand capacity to 600 milking cows or around 1,300 head in all. A training centre is also to be built where work will be done on embryo transfers.

He adds that the facility’s full potential will be exploited by building a bioenergy plant.

Speaking about the processing capacity of the ethyl alcohol plant, Serdar says that the daily raw material consumption is around 25 tonnes of corn. For the biogas plant a further 22,000 tonnes of corn silage or other biomass will be needed annually.

This will be the second biogas plant in the City of Zrenjanin, besides a recently opened plant in Botoš, according to the Zrenjanin City web site.

Vinex Etil currently employs 30 staff, and completing the bioenergy plant will create as many jobs again.

Translation provided by: www.halifax-translation.com