News

In an atypical context of energy crisis and after a summer of historic drought, Cristal Union launched a new sugar campaign which started in mid-September and which will end before the end of December. This anticipated schedule of approximately one week is a good compromise, which makes it possible to preserve agronomic potential for the beets harvested, while limiting the natural gas needs of the factories in the 1st quarter of 2023, a period during which consumption peaks are expected. . The objective is to avoid any risk of a gas supply disruption at the group's production sites. Cristal Union has in fact secured its gas supplies by contracting, well before this start of the campaign, with a leading energy supplier. The group has also defined a plan to rationalize its energy consumption. All gas-powered dehydration activities have been stopped, to the benefit of only biomass boilers, the deployment of which has been accelerated in recent months. Cristal Union also plans to increase its storage capacity for intermediate products during the campaign, pending less tense periods in terms of energy, starting in the spring, to crystallize the sugar and rectify or dehydrate the raw alcohol. These measures should enable the Group to reduce its gas consumption by approximately 10%. Cristal Union has been investing for years to reduce its energy consumption and its greenhouse gas emissions with an innovative and voluntary decarbonization strategy, and ambitious objectives: 10% energy consumed between 2015 and 2030, 25% emissions of CO2 over the entire scope of the group between 2015 and 2030 (35% on the industrial scope alone). Cristal Union is also rethinking its energy mix by aiming for carbon neutrality by 2050. The objective is to produce the energy necessary for the operation of the group's sugar factories, in particular with their own by-products, resulting from the transformation of beet, for factories energy self-sufficient.