translated from:
Burnett, D. La Solución Brasileña.
Selecciones del Reader’s Digest. October 2007, pp. 84-89.
Selecciones del Reader’s Digest. October 2007, pp. 84-89.
The Brazilian Solution
The objective is clear and urgent: to reduce our dependence on gas.
By Derek Burnett
When driving to a gas station in his car, the marketing consultant Eduardo Tokarski checks on the prices of the fuels marked at the pumps. His Peugeot 206 works with gas, but he noticed alcohol's price is almost 40% cheaper. He goes to a pump that says "Alcool" and asks the clerk to fill up the tank. Ethilic alcohol, also known as ethanol, is mixed with the remaining gas in his car tank.
Tokarski pays and then turns on the engine. A normal vehicle will start with difficulty, and it might get drown when the mix of gasoline and ethanol reached the cylinders; however, the Peugeot 206 process the mix without any further problem, and Tokarski drives away speeding up slightly.
Flex-fuel technology is a small miracle that allows that the cars work with gas, ethanol or a mixture of both using sensors that adjust the engine combustion. Since 2003 "flexible" cars, that are no more expensive that the normal cars, have attracted an incredible 83 percent of the market of new cars in Brazil. According to the agronomist Edgard Beauclair, expert in sugarcane growing and processing from the University of Sao Paulo, benefits are obvious: new car sales have increased, and sugarcane now is the second most important product in Brazil. "According to the most
recent calculations", he says, "Brazil will produce 20,000 millions of liters of alcohol for the end of 2007, which will generate a cash flow of 5,000 millions of reals (aprox USD 2,600 millions)".
How Brazil managed to take advantage to the rest of the world? To find it out, I went driving with the Agronomy engineer Mauricio Lyra in a Volkswagen Gol (flex-fuel engine, of course). Lyra works for Caete, a sugarcane growing and processing company with large plantations in the Brazilian states of Alagoas and Minas Gerais. We went through vast cane fields, with dozens of thousands of spiky plants taller than the average man size. Lyra stopped the car, and we went walking through a field, where the research department work developing more resistant varieties. They expect in a short timeframe these new plants to grow in countries where the weather is too cold for sugarcane growing.
We continued our walk through several miles of impenetrable sage-coloured plantations. I see a mechanic plower pulling out and breaking the thick stems (13 ft long) and throw canes 1 ft long to a load truck slowly driving aside the plower. Later, Lyra shows me one field being hand-cultivated. Through a slight cloud of smoke I see dozens of workers cutting with machetes the sugarcanes left standing after they have burned the plantations. "Half of Brazilian sugarcane is still plowed like ancient times", Lyra mentioned. At the end of the shift, each worker will have cut around eight tons of sugarcane, which are sent to a mill.
We walked to the mill. I start noticing the smell of sugar and I see a truck with two trailers full of sugarcane cut by hand. This is weighed, washed, piled and squeezed. The liquid flows to a maze of pipes, pumps and large containers, where it is fermented and then destilled. Tank trucks collect the alcohol from storage tanks and take it to the pump stations; more of the 90 percent of the 34,000 in Brazil have ethanol pumps. Nothing is wasted while processing sugarcane. After extracting the juice, bagasse is dried and used as fuel for a descentralized electricity plant for the plantations, mill and the distillery. That simple.
What stops the other countries from start with similar systems? Practically nothing, aside from lack of politic will, according to William Burnquist, who is the Strategic Development Manager of the Brazilian Center for Sugarcane Technology. "The only thing required to start is a ethanol pump and two or three flex-fuel cars", mentions. "If these cars are available, infrastructure can be developed little by little. If one day a customer cannot find ethanol, fills the tank with gas and next day he will get it".
But, how Brazil achieved to set up all the gas stations with ethanol pumps? Due to the energetic world crisis in 1975, the military dictatorship in the government created a National Ethanol Production Program, known as Proalcool. Farmers would receive subsidies to grow sugarcane; mills would save part of the harvest for fermenting and producing ethanol; gas stations would sell ethanol and carmakers would create vehicles to work with ethanol instead of gas. In full swing, in the middle of the eighties, 95 percent of the card made in Brazil were working only with alcohol. Henrique Oliveira, who writes a blog about ethanol, mentions what happened afterwards: "Sugar prices rised in 1989. Sugarcane plowing companies stopped producing ethanol, which caused long lines at the gas stations".
In 1997, not so many new cars were working solely with ethanol. Later in 2003, when oil prices rised again and with the innovation of flex-fuel vehicles, it started another period of ethanol rise. Ford, Fiat, Honda, GM, Peugeot/Citröen, Renault and Toyota sell flex-fuel models. Only in January 2007 more than 120,000 units were out of the plants, and it is expected for December 1.3 millions of units sold. Volkswagen in Brazil, which launched the first flex-fuel model in 2003, does not produce any other type of cars.
How world would change if everything worked ethanol-based? Laura Tetti, Environmental Advisor of the Brazilian Sugarcane Industrial Producers Association mentions that, due to the usage of flex-fuel cards, ethanol represents nowadays 40 percent of the total fuel sold for light vehicles sold in Brazil, and sugarcane companies are prepared to install 77 additional mills, which will increase production in 7,000 millions of lites between 2007 and 2010.
Tetti calculates that for each increase of 500 millions of liters in ethanol consumption, carbon dioxide emissions are reduced in 3.5 millions of tons per year, from the aprox 39 millions attributed to gas consumption. Assuming average car fueled with gas emits 4.3 tons of gases per year, this would be the same to stop running 800,000 gas-fueled cars.
Brazil has a considerable advantage for the rest of the countries to reach to their achievements. However, according to a recent study from the University of Campinas, near Sao Paulo, in twenty years, Brazil will be able to produce enough sugarcane ethanol to replace 10 percent of world gasoline consumption. David Sandalow, energy expert from Brookings Institute, points that US could replace 10 percent of the ethanol made with corn in this country, and with the big changes in technology this number could reach 30 percent, one goal that is reachable even for some countries that import ethanol.
"Aside from reducing carbon dioxide emissions in extraordinary amounts, ethanol production is a efficient way to generate new sources of employment", Tetti mentions. For example, average employment cost in ethanol production is $10,000, quite lower than the $91,000 required to create one in the car industry.
Other countries will have to adopt an economy based in ethanol, either based on their own crops, by importing the fuel or mixing both choices. This last possibility is the one more exciting for the ethanol supporters. They want it to be established as raw material all around the world, with a lot of supply sources. For own reasons of interest, even Brazilian people want this to happen. Without a doubt they will keep being the world leaders during several years, but having a higher supply will stabilize the market and will improve Brazil's international positioning.
"Almost all the countries are anxious to have the benefits of ethanol", Sandalow said. "It will reduce the oil dependency and it will help other countries to boost their economies. Potential benefits for developing countries are huge". Many African countries, he adds, have the adequate climate for sugarcane growing, like India, Thailand, Australia, Colombia and several other Caribbean nations. China is already the third higher sugarcane producer in the world.
Nowadays US produces ethanol fuel from corn. Sugarcane generally neither requires irrigation nor exhausts land. Converted into fuel, sugarcane yields eight times more energy than corn and its productions is 60 percent cheaper. Fermentation process generates carbon dioxide, but the plant releases so much energy that for each ton of ethanol used as gasoline substitute, carbon dioxide emissions are reduced in 2.1 tons. Aside of that, sugarcane helps to absorb CO2 from atmosphere. "As long as it grows, more CO2 is absorbed", mentioned Terri. "This is wonderful to control the greenhouse effect"
Some critics think that allocate so many farmlands to biofuel production could have awful consequences in food supply; some other warn about potential deforestation. "It will require huge efforts to avoid those problems", Sandalow
mentioned, "but if things are done in the right way, this tendency will be extremely helpful for the environment, for the people and for many economies".
When we left Caete facilities, Mauricio Lyra stops the car aside the road. Emerald-colored stems are along the horizon and are lightly balanced with the wind under a bright blue sky. I am glad to think in a future like that, where paved world's energy needs would be the engine that boosts us to preserve our agricultural
history.
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