The debate about biofuels has gained momentum in recent months. Paddy Comyntravelled to São Paolo, Brazil, a country that has been using the fuel for decades, and finds out where the truth lies in the argument
THE ONCE unthinkable situation of $100 per barrel of oil has come and gone. Opec president Chakib Khelil has predicted that this price could double within just two years. And he is not the only one. American car owners, who once filled their V8 SUVs with wanton abandon are now balking at $4 per gallon and are buying the Hybrid Toyota Prius in their droves.
Here in Ireland we prepare to change to a Vehicle Registration Tax (VRT) and road tax system that seeks to reduce our CO2 emissions from motoring and this has been a major source of confusion to the motorist. Another confusion surrounds an alternative fuel source called biofuel. Tax incentives on both the fuel itself and the cars that run on them would have given the impression that we had happened upon a miracle. All this time we had been fuelling our cars crudely with crude oil, when we could do it sacredly with corn and sugar cane.
Bioethanol, whether it is made from leftover cheese protein in Ireland, or ethanol made from sugar cane in Brazil would on the surface appear to offer a renewable source of fuel. The crops are grown, turned into ethanol, the car's combustion burns CO2 and the plants absorb it and give off oxygen. The perfect circle of life.
Or so you would think. Many governments around the globe jumped on this glimmer of hope which seemed to provide a solution to our dwindling oil reserves and melting world. For countries like the US it provided the prospect of energy security and gave the vocal corn farmers in the US something to shout about.
Here in Ireland, we have adopted the EU's targets of ensuring that biofuels and renewable fuels make up 10 per cent of our transport needs by 2020. Last February, then Minister for Energy Noel Dempsey adopted these targets and said that 2.2 per cent of the transport fuel market would come from biofuels by the end of 2008 and that there would be another target of 5.75 per cent by the beginning of 2010. Ireland would be forced to import biofuels to meet these targets, as the indigenous biofuel sector could not cope with such demand.
But the voices of concern were not long in making themselves heard. For over a year, environmental groups and many political figures have been saying that the race to grow crops for fuel in North and South America has meant that fuel crops have replaced food crops.
In Malaysia and Indonesia, the production of biofuels from palm oil has been heavily criticised because forests are being burned to clear the way for planting, thus negating any positive effects and leading to the extinction of plant and animal life. By importing such fuel from abroad, would we too be adding to the problem?
Even Brazil, where sugar cane has been turned into ethanol for decades, was not immune to the finger of suspicion. It has been alleged that the growth in demand for sugar cane has pushed production of other crops into the rainforests. However, Brazil has hit back and opened its doors to the world's delegates and press.
Marcos S Jank is the chief executive of the Brazilian Sugar Cane Industry Association (Unica) which is the largest organisation representing the sugar and bioethanol sectors. The member countries, which number over 100, represent over 50 per cent of the ethanol and 60 per cent of the sugar produced in Brazil. "We have been producing ethanol for the last 35 years, yet we appear to have been suddenly under attack for the past three months," he says.
Brazil first began using ethanol in automobiles as early as the 1920s, but the industry gained significant momentum in the 1970s with the introduction of ProAlcool, a federal programme created in response to the global oil crisis.
Despite a dip in the 1980s where oil prices fell and sugar prices were high, the rising price of oil and the introduction of Flex-Fuel vehicles (FFVs) by brands such as Fiat, which can run on ethanol, petrol or any mixture of the two accounted for the surge in the use of ethanol. Now in Brazil, 45 per cent of Brazilian car fuel and 3 per cent of the country's electricity comes from renewable sugar cane.
Two-thirds of all cars sold run on ethanol and all Brazilian gasoline sold at the pumps contains 25 per cent ethanol. Sugar cane and cane-based ethanol have a 16 per cent share in the country's energy matrix - a combination of all sources of energy including fuels and electricity. In February 2007, the consumption of ethanol surpassed that of gasoline for the first time in two decades.
"The energy balance of Brazilian ethanol is 4.5 times better than that of ethanol produced from sugar beet or wheat and almost seven times better than ethanol produced from corn," says Jank.
"Sugar cane covers just 7.8 million hectares in Brazil, or 2.3 per cent of the country's total arable land. Sixty per cent of the countrys total sugar cane production occurs in São Paolo State and this is some 2,500km from the Amazon Rainforest."
Jank argues that the rainforest is not under threat from ethanol production, due to the moving of cattle and soybean farming to these areas.
"There is very limited expansion of total arable land in Brazil. If you look at food production in Brazil, rather than dropping, the opposite has happened. Brazil's 2007 grain and oilseed harvest set a new record at 135 million tonnes, a doubling in production in the past 10 years.
"We need to look for other reasons for increases in food prices, such as higher oil prices, financial speculation on commodity prices, the demand for food from emerging markets such as India and China and the increasingly adverse climate conditions in several agricultural producing countries."
This assertion would appear to be backed up by a Wall Street Journal forecasting survey this week, which showed that 40 per cent of the economists surveyed said demand from China and India was the chief contributor to rising food costs.
Since only half of Brazil's sugarcane crop goes to ethanol, it is argued that Brazil has replaced nearly 50 per cent of its petrol consumption with just 1 per cent of its arable land.
Sugar cane ethanol offers advantages over that produced from corn, sugar beet, wheat and other feedstocks. Under current Brazilian conditions, the production of a given quantity of sugar cane ethanol yields nine times more energy than it consumes during production.
For each unit of fossil energy used to produce Brazilian sugarcane ethanol, 9.3 units of renewable energy are generated, four times better than that of ethanol from sugar beet and wheat and seven times that of corn ethanol.
"One hundred countries could supply biofuels to 200 nations, while currently 20 oil producers provide fossil fuels to the rest of the world," says Jank.
"There are 25 million hectares of degraded pastures available for sugar cane expansion, sugar prices have decreased by 20 per cent in 2007 and we have reduced CO2 emissions by 25.8 million tons last year thanks to the use of ethanol in Brazil," says Jank.
Subsidies and trade barriers in the US and the EU make it rewarding to produce ethanol from corns or grains that are less productive than sugar cane ethanol and have potentially greater environmental impacts.
A review of the policies on the biofuels we already have might pave the way for the use of ethanol to be at least part of the solution, if not the magic wand to sort the global oil crisis.