Ensus Plant Soon Up and Running, Implications For Wheat?

The Ensus bioethanol plant at Wilton on Teesside, the largest of its kind in Europe, is expected to be up and running before the end of the year. With an anticipated wheat requirement of 1.1 MMT, that is going to make a sizable dent in next season's exportable surplus.

After winter wheat was planted late and in largely unfavourably wet conditions, many crops looked in pretty poor shape after a much drier than normal Feb/Mar/Apr. A return to more normal British conditions of rain, interspersed with the odd few days of temperatures in the 70's and even low 80's in May, have the crop looking in much better shape now.

Even so, it seems highly unlikely that we will get the same bumper yields as last season, with the UK crop at the moment seeming likely to come in at somewhere between 14.2-14.6 MMT in 2009.

With the extra demand from Ensus, assuming of course that they do indeed buy British, this would make the UK's exportable surplus for the 2009/10 season maybe only a million tonnes or so, much more manageable than the 3 MMT+ we had in 2008/09.