Brazil's Biofuel Strategy Pays Off
by Justin Thomas, Virginia on 06.28.05
Brazil is a leader in the use of biofuels for transportation. About a third of the fuel Brazilians use in their vehicles is ethanol, known in Brazil as "alcohol." That compares with 3 percent in the United States. All gasoline sold in Brazil contains at least 26 percent ethanol, but motorists driving flexible-fuel cars have the option of filling up with pure ethanol, or E100, which currently is selling for about half the price of the blend.
Use of pure ethanol will rise sharply as carmakers in Brazil such as General Motors and Volkswagen make more flexible-fuel cars. Half the new vehicles sold this year will be able to use either pure ethanol or the blend, according to the Sao Paulo Sugar Cane Industry Union.
In the United States, the sugar-cane industry has had little incentive to diversify into ethanol production because import quotas support U.S. sugar prices far above world levels. Expansion of sugar cane acreage beyond Hawaii, Florida and the Gulf Coast is limited by the need for a long, frost-free growing season. The House-passed energy bill would authorize a three-year demonstration program for producing ethanol from sugar cane.
Most U.S.-produced ethanol is now made from ground corn in a process that has been faulted as inefficient. Corn yields less sugar per acre than sugar cane, and the refining uses substantial amounts of energy. To keep ethanol competitive with gasoline, major refiners such as Archer Daniels Midland Co. have relied since the 1970s on a tax subsidy, now 51 cents a gallon.
U.S. refiners sell a gasoline blend containing 10 percent ethanol in many parts of the Midwest, but they have been in no hurry to use more. Only a few hundred gasoline stations, mostly in the Midwest, offer a near-pure blend known as E85. Adapting cars to pure ethanol can be done relatively inexpensively by adding a fuel sensor and corrosion-resistant hoses, but there are only about 4 million flexible-fuel cars on U.S. roads out of more than 200 million.
:: Washington Post article via Triple Pundit
http://running_on_alcohol.tripod.com/id26.html seems to have alot of information on running your gas engine on ethanol and making your own ethanol.
How stupid of them.
In a recent issue of the journal Critical Reviews in Plant Sciences, UC Berkeley geoengineering professor Tad Patzek argued that up to six times more energy is used to make ethanol than the finished fuel actually contains.
San Francisco Chronicle: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/06/27/MNG1VDF6EM1.DTL
Kent, not many people agree with that calculation. It that same article it says:
Though his work has been vetted by several peer-reviewed scientific journals, Patzek has had to deflect criticism from a variety of sources. David Morris, an economist and vice president of the Minneapolis-based Institute for Local Self-Reliance, has attacked the Berkeley professor's analysis because he says it is based on farming and production practices that are rapidly becoming obsolete.
"His figures (regarding energy consumed in fertilizer production) are accurate for older nitrogen fertilizer plants, but newer plants use only half the energy of those that were built 35 years ago," he said. He also cited the increasing popularity of no-till farming methods, which can reduce a corn farm's diesel usage by 75 percent. "With hydrogen fuel, people are willing to say, '25 years from now it will be good.' Why can't we also be forward-looking when it comes to ethanol?"
Hosein Shapouri, an economist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, has also cracked down on Patzek's energy calculations.
"It's true that the original ethanol plants in the 1970s went bankrupt. But Patzek doesn't consider the impact new, more efficient production technologies have had on the ethanol industry," he said.
Shapouri's most recent analysis, which the USDA published in 2004, comes to the exact opposite conclusion of Patzek's: Ethanol, he said, has a positive energy balance, containing 67 percent more energy than is used to manufacture it. Optimistic that the process will become even more efficient in the future, he pointed out that scientists are experimenting with using alternative sources like solid waste, grass and wood to make ethanol. If successful on a large scale, these techniques could drastically reduce the amount of fossil fuel needed for ethanol production.
Other contributors to the debate argue that ethanol's net energy balance should not be the sole consideration when policymakers are evaluating its usefulness -- factors like the fuel's portability and lower carbon monoxide emissions need to be considered as well.
"So what if we have to spend 2 BTUs for each BTU of alcohol fuel produced?" reads an editorial in the Offgrid Online energy newsletter. "Since we are after a portable fuel, we might be willing to spend more energy to get it."
The most efficient way to make biofuels right now is to use agro-business waste... There are so many things that would be otherwise unused: Corn stalks that would be burned (and pollute the air) by farmers anyway, cellulose from tree transformation plants, orange peels from an orange juice factory. Things like that.
The U.S. is unlikely ever to produce or import enough sugar to make ethanol a viable option here. The CAFTA (Central American Free Trade Agreement) is currently stalled because it includes a provision to import more sugar from Central America (an amount equal to two packets of sugar per American per week). The US sugar industry has significant political power and is a sizeable obstacle to any changes in sugar imports or usage.
See article "Sugar Prices are Barrier to Securing Trade Pact"
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/29/business/worldbusiness/29trade.html
Well local sugar cane is better than shipping in foreign crops.
I am really worried about ethanol becoming popular. As I see it, it will drive up demand for endless monocultures of sugar cane or corn. All farmland was once wilderness, and we need to be find ways to use less land not more. Wilderness is vital for the planet and even neutralizes pollution.
Agriculture generally involves soil and wind erosion, water pollution, chemical imputs, and energy for machinery, drying, chemical production, etc.
I wonder how much pressure Brazil's ethanol industry puts on rainforests?
I guess another important question is "How much of the Brazilian rainforest has been destroyed to grow sugarcane?"
Here in Brazil people are very proud of our agroindustry because it´s being considered a miracle of the economy.
What most people don´t know is that our forests are being destryed to give place to soy plantation an cattle.
Sustainable development is a lie: When you make selective cut and remove a 3 thousand years old tree you´re destrying the best samples in the ecosystem. At the end only the weak trees remain. This process eliminate hundred of thousands of years of evolutionary process.
Unfortunatelly we can´t protect our forest by ourself. Brazil needs foreing help to protect the nature.
Im now studying sugar cane