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U.S. Eyes Brazil’s Ethanol Blueprint
By Mr Ethanol | May 1, 2007
Brazil is infamous for its deep divide between rich and poor, but most drivers are equal at the pumps. Day laborers jammed in minivans and professionals motoring solo in air-conditioned comfort can buy gasoline - or pay about 40 percent less per tank for ethanol.
It’s such a no-brainer that almost everyone fills up with the alcohol-based fuel, produced from endless fields of sugarcane that carpet Latin America’s largest nation. And as long as international oil prices stay above $50 per barrel, ethanol will likely stay on top in Brazil’s revolutionary fuel choice experiment.
Three years after American, German and Italian automakers unveiled “flex-fuel” cars in Brazil that run on gas, pure ethanol or any combination of the two, foreign investors are pouring in billions of dollars to start up ethanol operations in a nation some call “the Saudi Arabia of renewable fuel.”
Countries like China, Italy and Japan plan to start mixing ethanol with gas and are securing supplies and know-how from the planet’s most efficient producer and top exporter.
Brazil has boosted its ethanol production 40 percent over the last five years, from 3 billion gallons in 2002 to 4.2 billion gallons last year. During the same period, U.S. production rose 75 percent, from 2.8 billion gallons to 4.9 billion gallons, almost all of which went to the domestic U.S. market.
While Brazil is pledging to double production over the next decade, many experts agree American farmers can’t meet the potential demand from President Bush’s goal of consuming 35 billion gallons of alternative fuels every year by 2017, a fivefold increase over current requirements. That’s a big reason why Bush inked a deal with Brazil in March to promote production elsewhere in Latin America and the Caribbean.
The boom is so hot that ethanol promoters even talk openly about how a post-Castro Cuba could become a key supplier for the United States, which produces ethanol from corn, a much less efficient raw material than sugarcane. Article continues…
Topics: BizOp, Brazil, Ethanol, News |
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