Miguel
Villena Reyes
How has Tomsa Destil impacted the alcohol industry?
Throughout the last 50 years, the presence of Tomsa Destil and its technology in the international market of alcohol producers has had different impacts, some of which have a more regional character and others have been global.
On a global level and in general, TOMSA has been able to bring the most advanced technology in the sector across the world. As world pioneers of some of the technologies with the greatest impact on alcohol production processes, such as vacuum distillation, sugar extraction by means of diffusers, alcohol purification until reaching practically pure qualities with 0 ppm of impurities, or many others, and with projects executed in 50 countries and active commercial presence in many more, we have achieved that nowadays TOMSA’s technological innovations are present in all continents.
Additionally, TOMSA DESTIL has committed to efficient and quality production processes for its equipment that allow us to offer solutions at competitive prices, popularizing the technology and not limiting its access to exclusive or high value-added markets. Currently, our most technologically advanced processes are present in very competitively priced markets such as India, the Philippines, Thailand, Central and South America and even several African countries. All this, of course, competing with local process suppliers with eventual competitive advantages, although without as many technological advances as those offered by TOMSA. TOMSA’s business strategy of being directly involved in the most important stages of the production chain (collection of materials at international level, manufacturing of process equipment in our own workshops, internal logistics management, assembly, installation, testing and start-up with our own resources and even O&M services for our customers) provides added value and results that have few precedents in the industry.
Some examples of the implementation of this business strategy is the case of the Tequila production industry in Mexico. Since the late 1990s, TOMSA has been able to introduce its technological innovations to a sector that, at that time, operated with very low yields and efficiencies, high operating costs and low-quality standards for finished products. Today, around 70% of the volume of Tequila produced in the world incorporates some technological solution from TOMSA DESTIL. The growth of the sector, the improvement in quality and the capacity to adapt the product to meet the quality requirements of very demanding markets such as Asia or the United States, and the exponential growth in the level of exports of this distillate are partly due to the technological impulse that TOMSA has incorporated to the entire industry in the last 25 years.
The flexibility in TOMSA’s technological supply has allowed everyone, both large producers and small producers, multinationals, or small entrepreneurs to have the opportunity to access reliable, robust, efficient and advanced technological processes. TOMSA has always promoted the incorporation of its technology in all areas of the industry. Currently, we have been able to offer distillation equipment from short path type of little more than 25 liters per hour to vacuum distillation columns with a capacity of up to 1,000,000 liters of alcohol per day. TOMSA’s interest and dedication to bring its technology closer to any industrial sector and project size has once again allowed the incorporation of innovation to sectors that historically were resigned to the most rudimentary and artisanal processes without the possibility of accessible technological incorporation.
The evolution and optimization of TOMSA’s processes has also focused on energy optimization and environmental impact of industries. Currently, the integration, efficiency and energy use of the processes supplied are infinitely more optimized than ever before, offering solutions with energy consumption never seen before, use of by-products and their recovery, minimum consumption of natural resources such as water and others, and even processes and industries with zero waste. Many of the processes offered by TOMSA have carbon emission credits, thanks to the integration of raw materials, energy, valorization of by-products and process efficiency, and include plants capable of generating their own electricity consumption, exporting surplus electricity to the grid, and even generating their own thermal steam source.
We are currently in a period of transition and uncertainty in the industry, where the latest world events such as COVID, the war in Ukraine and the shortage of supplies are generating a lot of tension in the markets and, additionally, the announcements and forecasts of restrictive policies in the medium term on the use of traditional fuels and, consequently, of biofuels for blending with gasoline, are forcing producers, distributors, marketers and technologists such as TOMSA to evaluate new trends and technological proposals that allow the continuity of the alcohol industry. In this sense, for some time now, TOMSA has been working on new technologies to produce renewable hydrogen from vegetable alcohols (such as methanol, ethanol or other higher alcohols) that allow the subsistence and give sense to the future of the alcohol industry that for decades TOMSA DESTIL has been attending incessantly at a global level.
