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10:47AM Wednesday 03 December, 2008

'No' to sweet solution

18 July 2008

| By Grant Reynolds

Watching television news footage of a project he began more than 30 years ago, Des Sweeney could be forgiven for thinking what might have been.

The local businessman and engineer was approached to help an ailing Sunshine Coast sugar cane industry in the late ’70s.

Sugar prices had plummeted and growers from Ballina to Bowen, including the large number on the Sunshine Coast, were staring down the barrel of record low sugar prices. The ensuing years were a sad tale of mill closures as an industry based on family farms collapsed under the burden of debt and low returns.

Mr Sweeney’s answer to the decline of the late ’70s was to keep the farmers employed and turn the cane over to ethanol production.

Ironically, the words used in the newsreel describing increasing petrol cost, unleaded had just jumped to 39 cents per litre and a dying industry could easily be found in this month’s news reports. Mr Sweeney’s investigations took him to Brazil to meet with cane farmers and government officials.

Mr Sweeney said he purchased the Eumundi Butter Factory in 1977 and it wasn’t long before a pilot plant was operating aided by the most-up-to-date research coming from universities in Queensland.

A by-product of ethanol was a livestock feed, and Mr Sweeney had contracts in place with Chinese buyers for eight tonnes per month and he was fetching nearly $20 per tonne for the sugar farmers.

The final piece of the puzzle, a $6 million dollar processing machine from England, was ordered but cancelled at the last minute.

Mr Sweeney said he “hit snags” within government and he was told he would have been taxed heavily.

“It makes me annoyed to think what we could have done in 28 years,” he said.

“With the price of petrol today and the collapse of the sugar farms, ethanol production would be a great advantage to the Sunshine Coast.”

In his interview for the program in 1980, when petrol cost 39 cents per litre, Mr Sweeney said he could see a 10% ethanol/petrol blend in use across Australia.

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