Sugar Sugar (The Hidden Friedman)

Tom Friedman hits the road and heads to Brazil to learn how that country has become a mecca for ethanol (The Energy Harvest is fully available to Times Select subscribers):

My impression, after talking to a range of Brazilian experts, is that not only is ethanol for real, but we have not even begun to tap its full potential. With just a few technological breakthroughs, Brazil really could be the Saudi Arabia of sugar and we could actually achieve that energy dream of getting “barrels from bushels.”

Since the 1970’s oil shocks, Brazil has, with lots of trial and error, made ethanol part of its daily life. It hits you the minute you drive into a gas station in São Paulo, where you need two things: a credit card and a calculator. In rough numbers, sugar ethanol now sells here at a little over $2 a gallon and gasoline at a little more than $4 a gallon. Because sugar ethanol gets only about 70 percent of the mileage of gasoline, drivers here do the math each day and figure out if ethanol is at least 30 percent less than the price of gasoline. If it is, many will fill ’er up with sugar cane.

Brazilians have that luxury because there are 34,000 gas stations here that offer both gasoline and ethanol (compared with around 700 in the U.S.) and because 70 percent of new cars sold here can run on either gasoline or sugar ethanol. As a result, Brazil has replaced about 40 percent of its gasoline consumption with sugar ethanol.

I visited the Cosan sugar mill northwest of São Paulo, Brazil’s largest, where you fly in over an ocean of green sugar cane. The cane is harvested onto big lorries and trucked to the Cosan distillery. There, the juice is extracted and converted to either crystal sugar or ethanol. The remaining cane waste — called bagasse — is used to fuel huge steam boilers that produce enough electricity to both power the refining process and leave a surplus to be sold back to the grid.

It’s important to understand this process to appreciate just how “much more energy we could get from sugar cane” with just a few more breakthroughs, explained Plinio Mario Nastari, one of Brazil’s top ethanol consults.

Think of each stalk of sugar cane as containing three sources of energy. First, the juice extracted from the cane is already giving us ethanol and sugar. Second, the bagasse is already heating very low-technology, low-pressure boilers, giving us electricity. But if Brazil’s refiners converted to new high-pressure boilers, you could get three times as much electricity.

Finally, when the cane is harvested the tops and leaves are often just left in the field. But this biomass is rich in cellulose, the carbohydrate that makes up the walls of plant cells. If the sugar locked away in cellulose also could be unlocked — cheaply and easily by a chemical process — this biomass could also produce tons of sugar ethanol. There is now a race on to find that process.

A breakthrough is expected within five years, and when that happens it will be possible to extract “more than double” the amount of ethanol from each sugar stalk, said José Luiz Oliverio, a senior V.P. at Dedini, the Brazilian industrial giant, which has a pilot cellulosic ethanol project.

I asked Brazilian experts what they’d do if they were the U.S. president. The consensus answer: Require U.S. oil companies to provide ethanol fuel pumps at all their gas stations, require U.S. auto companies to make all their new cars flex-fuel and improve mileage standards, and get rid of the crazy 54-cent tariff we’ve imposed on imported sugar ethanol (to protect our farmers). And then let the market work.

While we're on the subject, here's quick round-a-bout of ethanol news bits:

• The Yomiuri Shimbun reports that Honda will begin producing flex-fuel cars capable of running solely on bioethanol—E100. The report follows Honda’s announcement that it, in partnership with RITE, has developed a process for the production of cellulosic ethanol. [Green Car Congress]
  
  
• China plans to more than treble its fuel ethanol output by 2010 to reduce the country's dependence on imported oil and to boost the income of hundreds of millions of farmers. China now has four government-sponsored fuel ethanol plants with total annual capacity of 1.02 million tonnes. [Reuters via Planet Ark]
  
  
• The ambitious founders of Google, the popular search engine company, have set up a philanthropy, giving it seed money of about $1 billion and a mandate to tackle poverty, disease and global warming.
  [...]
  One of its maiden projects reflects the philanthropy’s nontraditional approach. According to people briefed on the program, the organization, called Google.org, plans to develop an ultra-fuel-efficient plug-in hybrid car engine that runs on ethanol, electricity and gasoline.
  
  The philanthropy is consulting with hybrid-engine scientists and automakers, and has arranged for the purchase of a small fleet of cars with plans to convert the engines so that their gas mileage exceeds 100 miles per gallon. The goal of the project is to reduce dependence on oil while alleviating the effects of global warming. [NYTimes]