Brazilian aircraft maker Embraer and General Electric are working with renewable fuel company Amyris to develop sugar cane-based jet fuel for airliners. They say a test flight by Brazilian airline Azul Linhas Aereas could come in early 2012. (Original post and image via WIRED)
Gal Luft has an interesting (although, perhaps, a little too ambitious in its projections) write-up in FP magazine on the potential for Brazil to find an Iranian market, always in desperate need of refined fuels, for its ethanol bio-fuels. Summary below:
Gal Luft has an interesting (although, perhaps, a little too ambitious in its projections) write-up in FP magazine on the potential for Brazil to find an Iranian market, always in desperate need of refined fuels, for its ethanol bio-fuels. Summary below:
...Brazil is the world's largest sugar grower. This year it experienced a bumper crop, with output growing 16 percent from a year earlier. But due to a global glut, sugar prices have plunged 57 percent since February. Because sugar cane is a perishable crop that cannot be stored, the best way for Brazil to generate value from its undervalued surplus is by converting it into ethanol, of which Brazil is already the second-largest producer (after the United States) and a major consumer (for years Brazilians have driven mostly flex-fuel cars, which can run on any combination of gasoline and ethanol). The country's ethanol production is expected to rise 19 percent to 8 billion gallons this year.
For Tehran, Brazil's surplus ethanol could be a strategic savior. Iran is a major exporter of crude oil, but lacks the refinery capacity to process most of it; as a result, the second-largest oil producer in OPEC depends on other countries' exports of refined gasoline. A conference committee in the U.S. Congress is hammering out legislation that aims to exploit this weakness by imposing sanctions on foreign companies that supply refined petroleum products to Iran. Tehran has been bracing for these sanctions for a while, taking measures to address its Achilles' heel: building seven new refineries, expanding existing ones, converting cars to run on natural gas (of which Iran has the world's second-largest reserves), and securing alternative gasoline supplies from China and Venezuela.
But none of these efforts would give Iran the immediate injection of motor fuel it needs as swiftly as Brazil's ethanol. Brazil could replace most of the 5.8 million gallons of gasoline that Iran imports daily (a conventional internal-combustion car engine can handle up to 20 percent ethanol in its fuel blend without damage to the engine; in the United States most cars already run on 10 percent). Doing so would pull the teeth out of the gasoline sanctions legislation, rendering it useless before it even reaches President Barack Obama's desk.
... For years, Brazil has been clamoring to export its surplus ethanol to the United States, only to be blocked by lawmakers beholden to powerful American agricultural lobbies. If not for a prohibitive 54-cent-per-gallon import tariff on Brazilian ethanol -- not to mention a sugar quota and tariff system that restricts imports and keeps sugar prices in the United States much higher than the world price -- the fuel could have ended up in American gas tanks rather than reducing the country's leverage with Tehran....The tariff on Brazilian ethanol has been a lingering source of tension between Brazil and the United States for years. Both Presidents George W. Bush and Obama, in their meetings with Lula, rejected his request to eliminate the tariff. Now Lula is taking his revenge, and it's surely a sweet one.
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