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I have been to many parts of Brazil and seen their sugar cane empire and the sugar cane refining process. I've driven "alcool" (sugar cane alcohol) powered cars too. Nearly every new car sold in Brazil is flex fuel that will run 100 percent pure Alcool or regular "dinosaur juice" gasoline (which contains 25 percent sugar cane alcohol mix in Brazil). You cannot buy 100 percent "dinosaur juice" gasoline at the pump in Brazil.
Brazil is the Saudi Arabia of agriculture, a vast land nearly the size of the USA with abundant rain and tropical climate. Sugar cane is grown in a rural agricultural empire larger than most US states. They refine the sugar cane into alcohol in distilleries almost like making moonshine. The distilleries are small and scattered all over the sugar cane empire so they don't have to waste energy hauling around the raw cane. Instead they use the waste cuttings from the cane fields in the small, simple distilleries to burn and create heat for the distilleries. After the cane is squeezed to get cane juice, it is boiled by the heat from the waste cuttings and the alcohol is sifted off the top. It is such a simple process that requires almost no other energy source to obtain the pure sugar cane alcohol. I have poured fresh pure sugar cane alcohol distilled out of a $2000 "still" in the cane fields, right into the gas tank of a Chevy flex fuel rental car and driven off without any different performance than if I got it from the pump at a gas station. It's all the same stuff, and there's no other additives. It also burns very clean with almost no pollution.
Sugar cane alcohol contains more BTU than corn ethanol, but still not as many BTU as regular gasoline. That's why a sugar cane alcohol (or corn ethanol) powered car typically gets about 20 to 25 percent less miles per gallon than the exact same gasoline powered car. If you study the sugar cane empire in Brazil, it is quite a wonder. It works for them because they have the vast tropical lands with abundant rain, and fewer cars than the USA. The US motor vehicle count outnumbers Brazil by almost 10 to 1, but they still have a dozen huge metro areas that are almost as large as the top 10 of the US metro areas and they really are traffic choked.
You have to give Brazil credit for being one of the world's first large countries that is not a traditional oil export powerhouse to break themselves from addiction to imported oil. They figured out 30+ years ago in the early 1970s that the middle east shieks had the power to hold them hostage, and they made a long range plan to change. It was a plan that the environmental lobby would kill in the US because it involved the construction of vast hydroelectric dams to produce 90+ percent of their electric power (instead of burning coal, natural gas or oil). It also set the sugar cane alcohol revolution in motion. It's really been only in the last 5 years that the sugar cane alcohol sales have really taken off. Now that nearly every car model in Brazil is sold with a flex fuel engine for no extra surcharge, nearly everyone is buying a car that can run on alcohol. Every gas station in Brazil sells pure sugar cane alcohol or regular gas mixed with 25 percent alcohol (for non flex fuel cars). They have finally broken the "chicken vs. egg" cycle that held back the widespread sale of pure sugar cane alcohol for cars.
Now, their next move is to replace diesel fuel in with soy based bio diesel. Don't laugh, did I mention Brazil is the largest soy producer in the world? It's already coming on strong. They may be a developing country with poverty and many social problems, but there are things going on there worth paying attention to. At least they are doing something instead of just sucking down more and more imported oil like we are at prices that are larceny. Maybe this is why the value of the Brazilian Real has doubled against the dollar in the past 4 years or so, a currency that just over 10 years ago was almost worthless against the dollar.
Location: We_tside PNW (Columbia Gorge) / CO / SA TX / Thailand
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No one has mentioned bio-mass??? (it will replace a lot of corn ethanol)
Brazil does have advantages... as mentioned huge Ag base / land mass, lower consumption, plenty of 'worker-bees', price dis-incentives, a strategic plan that is not torpedoed with incentives to big oil...
Conservation is key... USA won't get there without it, and it is not known to be too 'frugal'....
I've been getting 50 mpg since 1976... where have you been? (So says my bumper sticker in "prius" country ... just that my current car (Rabbit pickup) cost me $35.00 and has 350,000 miles and runs just fine, and will continue to do so for another 30 yrs, maybe I'll need 3 more $30 batteries and a few $5 tires that I get at the junk yard. Worst case a $300 engine rebuild, and a $60 clutch, but I doubt it.)
As some others have mentioned, Brazil does not have anything resembling the automobile ownership/usage level of the US or other Western nations. If they did, its doubtful they could pull it off.
Look at this way. Its not accident that Brazil uses ethanol but not Sweden.
But hey, give them credit for working well with what they have.
I haven't read the entire post, so I assume that I'll be rehashing some basic arguements against corn-ethanol.
It takes nearly .85 gallons of diesel to convert corn to one gallon of ethanol.
If you took every ear of corn grown in the United States now and used it to produce ethanol, we'd have generate less than 10% of the gasoline that we currently use.
By using so much corn, we'll drive up the cost of feed for livestock, thus raising the price on dairy and meats.
Forests will have to be cut to create more crop lands.
... On a global scale, I'm optimistic about the future of solar power.
I haven't read the entire post, so I assume that I'll be rehashing some basic arguements against corn-ethanol.
It takes nearly .85 gallons of diesel to convert corn to one gallon of ethanol.
If you only look at the American Corporate model for making ethanol.
$200k tractors, petro-chem fertilizers, harvesters, trucks, factories, etc, then once you make ethanol you still have to truck it to gas stations.
The foreign model uses, no tractors, organic fertilizers, horse-drawn harvesters, horse-drawn wagons to truck the corn, stalk-burning distilleries, etc.
Again the wide disparity between upper-class and peasants in a culture allow this.
And they are out producing our ethanol production, with only a fraction of our need for oil to do it.
Ethanol just isn't worth it. If you drive on ethanol you get LESS miles per gallon than the same tank of gasoline. Food costs will INCREASE then if we continued to use gasoline (even when its more expensive) than to use ethanol. However, don't worry, electric hybrids are much better than ethanol as soon as the rhetroic from politicians, environmental groups, and oil company lobbyists stop talking...
If you only look at the American Corporate model for making ethanol.
$200k tractors, petro-chem fertilizers, harvesters, trucks, factories, etc, then once you make ethanol you still have to truck it to gas stations.
The foreign model uses, no tractors, organic fertilizers, horse-drawn harvesters, horse-drawn wagons to truck the corn, stalk-burning distilleries, etc.
Again the wide disparity between upper-class and peasants in a culture allow this.
And they are out producing our ethanol production, with only a fraction of our need for oil to do it.
Have you ever tried farming with a horse OMG thats work!! Now way you'll the production needed.
P.S. I've commented on ethonal on other threads. It's a waste of corn
In Brazil alot of people get around by walking, bus, or motorcycles (very small ones that get about 75-100 mpg). They don't have much of a car culture except in very large cities and even then, most people take busses.
We'd be considerably better off importing Brazil's sugar fuels than making our own out of corn, considering how much more efficient sugar cane-based ethanol is. The current corn-based ethanol drive is, unfortunately, a huge subsidy for a small amount of agro-corps paid for by the entire American population.
Our food and fuel prices would be far better off if corn and sugar were both traded freely between nations without government interference, rather than having this complex mess of subsidies and tariffs.
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... just that my current car (Rabbit pickup) cost me $35.00 and has 350,000 miles and runs just fine, and will continue to do so for another 30 yrs, maybe I'll need 3 more $30 batteries and a few $5 tires that I get at the junk yard. Worst case a $300 engine rebuild, and a $60 clutch, but I doubt it.)
