Bioenergy production in Central America: Integration of sweet sorghum into sugar mills

The ethanol produced from sweet sorghum during off-season can help to implement and maintain a sustainable ethanol program in the region that does not only depend on sugarcane. Sweet sorghum would allow distilleries to easily supply the ethanol required to implement an E5 or ED3 program. Central America could produce about 387 million liters of ethanol by growing sweet sorghum on 5% of its cropland. This ethanol production would help the region to reduce fossil fuel bills by USD$ 517 million by using ethanol-gasoline blends or USD$ 463 million by using ethanol-diesel blends.