Rough draft... very incomplete

This is what i had in the beginning of April.... these first few pages are what led to my final title and paper topics.

It is no secret that we are facing an energy crisis in the world today. The 20^th century brought us the automobile for personal transportation and this trend has spread like a wildfire across the world. Today the world contains around seven hundred million personal vehicles, with the majority of them running on gasoline. They have gone beyond the time when they were luxuries and are now an important part of many of our lives. Here in the United States we have around seven hundred vehicles for every one thousand people. In China the number is much lower; twenty vehicles for every one thousand Chinese. China is the largest growing economy in the world and it is only a matter of time before they enjoy vehicle numbers like us in the US. With this in mind and other big countries in Asia such as India following the same trend, it is obvious that the relatively low oil prices we have seen in our lifetime will cease to exist. This is a major reason why biofuels have emerged on the world market as a potential commodity to either reduce or end our dependence on petroleum as a fuel source. Among the pioneers in this field, Brazil stands out as the first to put full scale biofuel infrastructures in place to help end the countries economic dependence on petroleum. The US is also a leader in ethanol production, but the fear is that our feedstock is unsustainable at the present and new technologies must emerge before our crops will have the energy return seen in Brazil’s ethanol production. This paper will show the potential of Brazil as a model for ethanol production and the future possibilities for US ethanol production.

Brazil the Pioneer:

The seventies turned out to be a turning point in petroleum prices all over the world. At a time when Brazil was developing economically, oil prices almost quadrupled on the world market. Brazil’s economy was already suffering and this only furthered instability, as a result they began to explore alternative solutions. They began off-shore exploration for petroleum and implemented a program to make large quantities of ethanol from sugarcane to substitute gasoline.

This was a convenient change for Brazil at the time. Since the eighteenth century sugarcane has been a substantial part of Brazil’s agriculture sector. In the mid seventies, Brazil was the third largest sugar producer around five million raw tons. At the same time sugarcane was in a price drought on the international market. So the decision was made to divert some of the sugar for ethanol production. The oil explorations have managed to pay off as well. Until recently, Shell Oil was the sole investor to off-shore petroleum exploration. Now European nations are looking at buying “blocks” for exploration as well as nations within Latin America.

“Italian, Norwegian, Spanish and Argentine companies won oil exploration and production concessions at an annual government auction here Tuesday, but a federal judge in Brasilia later suspended the auction. The court objected to a rule of Brazil's National Petroleum Agency that limits the number of offers a bidder can make.”(Foreign companies win oil concessions at Brazil auction)

This is news as of the end of 2006, but it shows a growing interest in Brazilian oil potential and that this program is proving to pay off.

There were two ethanol approaches the government took at the time. The first was to make anhydrous alcohol to make E10 or ten percent ethanol, ninety percent gasoline. The upside to this was it required no engine modifications. The other approach was to modify engines to accept hydrated ethanol that consisted of ninety-five percent ethanol and five percent water. This was used in modified gasoline engines. The automobile industries in Brazil got on board and making modifications to cars for sale on the domestic market. With minor modifications done by the manufacturers the vehicles run on E25. This development has led to the production of flex fuel technology that is commercially available. These vehicles surprisingly sell for no additional cost. They account for twenty percent of the cars sold in Brazil now and can run on gasoline, ethanol, or natural gas. Ironically, the US company GM has released a line of cars in Brazil, but Volkswagon has the biggest market share. The reason these cars are not being sold on the world market is because no other country has the infrastructure to accommodate a large amount of flex-fuel cars while Brazil offers ethanol at almost every station.

Brazilian Infrastructure vs. Foreign Infrastructure

As I said before, Brazil was fortunate to have sugarcane as a prominent crop within the country to use. In other countries they are often lacking a staple crop to use for biofuel.

In the past, the Brazilian Government subsidized this programme through a variety of mechanisms, particularly `soft' loans to the sugarcane growers, which built ethanol distilleries, and incentives to encourage people to purchase pure ethanol driven cars. Estimates of the total amount of investment in the agricultural and industrial sectors for automotive ethanol fuel between 1975 and 1989 reach a total of US$ 4.92 billion (2001 US$). Oil imports avoided meant savings amounting to US$ 52.1 billion (January 2003 US$) from 1975 to 2002. (The Ethanol Program in Brazil)

Another convenient part of their service stations were that they had pumps for both regular and “super gas” which contained lead still. Much like our octane pumps here in the US. They were simply able to replace the “super gas” with ethanol and they had a pump infrastructure set up. This leads me to believe that the US has much of the same potential for infrastructure. Our domestic corn ethanol does not have the same energy return as sugarcane and it is questioned if it is a viable solution to the problem in America, but we do have service stations with three pumps for gasoline. If we produce an efficient ethanol crop we could drop mid grade octane fuel (88-90), then we could have an open ethanol pump at almost every gas station in the country. We are already providing around 1.4 billion dollars in subsidies to promote ethanol production. It seems that our shortcomings are in debating its viability. We have proved that corn ethanol is not an energy solution. In Brazil sugarcane works, in the US I believe our best chance lies in the technology for cellulosic ethanol. This is where the money for research needs to be concentrated if we plan to solve our domestic energy problem.

Is Ethanol Ethical?

Three of the largest debates about ethanol are:

1) Food vs. Fuel

2) The amount of energy it takes to produce ethanol.

3) Where is the land to produce these crops?

According to a study done at Cornell University, they found that it takes twenty-nine percent more energy to produce a gallon of corn ethanol than is embodied in its final product. Some numbers I read on sugarcane ethanol have put its embodied energy at three times more than production energy. Corn is often used for human or animal consumption and taking it out of the market will put a strain on these other economies. World food availability is put into question. The 2007 rise in corn prices is attributed to ethanol production in the US or “ethnoinflation” as one article said. There has been a twenty five percent increase in corn prices in Mexico attributed to corn ethanol production. Sugarcane on the other hand is being developed in many parts of Asia now and is flooded on the market. Brazil is still the world’s largest producer, but with other countries supplying the world market, more sugarcane can be diverted into their ethanol program. Agricultural land availability could be a kink for biofuels. Finding enough agricultural land to supply the US with crops for ethanol has posed another problem. Some speculate that it will be poorer countries who replace food crops with energy crops; another option for these countries is deforestation for agricultural land. This is the route Brazil has taken. Since forests especially the Amazon are areas of CO2 consumption, this could actually lead to a rise in greenhouse gases in the end and reverse the carbon neutral idea that drives biofuel technology.