From FUNDAÇÃO DE AMPARO À PESQUISA DO ESTADO DE SÃO PAULO and the “great gasoline famine of 2032” department
Brazilian ethanol can replace 13.7 percent of world’s crude oil consumption
Expansion of sugarcane cultivation for biofuel in areas not under environmental protection or reserved for food production could also reduce global emissions of carbon dioxide by up to 5.6%, according to a study by researchers in Brazil, the US and Europe
Expansion of sugarcane cultivation in Brazil for ethanol production in areas not under environmental protection or reserved for food production could potentially replace up to 13.7% of world crude oil consumption and reduce global emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) by as much as 5.6% by 2045.
These estimates come from an international study with Brazilian participation, whose results were published on October 2017 in the journal Nature Climate Change.
The study set out to investigate how the expansion of sugarcane ethanol could help limit the rise in average global temperatures to less than 2 °C by reducing CO2 emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels, as agreed by the 196 countries that signed the Paris Climate Agreement in December 2015.
The study was conducted as part of a project supported by the São Paulo Research Foundation – FAPESP and by the National Institute of Science and Technology for Bioethanol – INCT Bioethanol. The participating researchers are affiliated with the University of Campinas’s Agricultural Engineering School (FEAGRI-UNICAMP) and the University of São Paulo’s Bioscience Institute (IB-USP) and Luiz de Queiroz College of Agriculture (ESALQ-USP). They collaborated with colleagues at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), Iowa State University and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications in the United States, the University of Copenhagen and Danish Energy Association in Denmark, and Lancaster University in the United Kingdom.
The researchers used software developed at UIUC to simulate the growth of plants such as sugarcane hour by hour based on soil composition, temperature, rainfall, and drought, among other parameters.
They used three different environmental policy scenarios to simulate sugarcane expansion in the context of climate change projected for 2040 and 2050 by the five main general circulation models.
Under Scenario 1, sugarcane expansion was limited to existing pasturelands that could be replaced with the crop according to the Sugarcane Agroecological Zoning Plan (ZAE Cana) established in 2009 by EMBRAPA, the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation.
Under Scenario 2, sugarcane production was expanded not only to areas available for the crop identified by ZAE Cana but also to areas that will not be needed to grow food crops and animal feed, even assuming a rise in demand for food in the coming decades due to population growth.
Scenario 3 was the same except that it included natural and semi-natural vegetation that can be legally converted to cropland.
All three scenarios excluded environmentally sensitive areas such as the Amazon and Pantanal, which cannot be used for agricultural or industrial activities.
The analysis showed that sugarcane cultivation for ethanol production could expand to between 37.5 million and 116 million hectares under the three scenarios and that sugarcane ethanol could supply the equivalent of between 3.63 million and 12.77 million barrels of oil per day in 2045 given the projected climate change, while at the same time ensuring conservation of forests and areas reserved for food production.
As a result, it would be possible to reduce oil consumption by 3.8%-13.7% and net global emissions of CO2 by 1.5%-5.6% by 2045 compared with data for 2014.
“Our findings show it’s possible to reconcile the two key goals to which Brazil committed as part of the Paris accord: conservation of natural environments, especially the Amazon, and increasing use of renewable energy,” said Marcos Buckeridge, a professor at IB-USP and one of the authors of the article.
“The study highlights Brazil’s courage in inventing sugarcane ethanol as a biofuel and implementing it as a nationwide solution,” Buckeridge told Agência FAPESP. “This potential expansion of sugarcane wouldn’t work without integration between the agricultural and industrial segments, and this, in turn, underscores the importance of concentrating strongly on the science and technology of sugarcane in the coming years. We must complete the job we began, which means second-generation ethanol.”
Scalable solution
The authors of the study note that sugarcane ethanol is a near-term scalable solution to the problem of reducing CO2 emissions in the global transportation sector.
Production of fuel ethanol from sugarcane in Brazil is far more efficient than corn ethanol production, they argue. Its CO2 emissions correspond to only 14% of oil’s. Moreover, emissions resulting from land-use change to sugarcane cultivation can be offset in just two to eight years.
“Rapid scalability is fundamental: this is what’s needed to accelerate society’s responses to climate change,” Buckeridge said. “All the evidence suggests the average global temperature rise will exceed 1.5 °C in 2030. That’s not far off. Brazilian ethanol can be a great help to the planet.”
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OOPs, thats Cachaca.
Someone tell Gov. Brown of California. Ethanol from sugarcane does better with the states low carbon fuel standard (LCFS) as opposed to ethanol from corn. That way, Brazil can export sugarcane based ethanol to California at an artificially high price and the Brazilians can import corn based ethanol at a discount.
Sounds like a joke but its not: http://www.cornandsoybeandigest.com/energy/us-importing-exporting-ethanol-and-brazil
Sean: Sounds like a joke but its not:
Anything more recent?
Looks like a good investment opportunity for someone. Especially if a salt-tolerant variety of sugar cane can be developed to grow near the Earth’s thousands of miles of seashore, perhaps in Baja California, Chile, Australia, or Morocco..
Getting the price below $25 per barrel of oil energy equivalent would be a blessing.
Cane sugar has never been grown in my town but sugar beets have been. How would work using sugar from sugar beets? Let the market prevail here and use the sugar where it will command the best price. What we really need is a process that will efficiently convert any organic matter to a usable, easy to store and use fuel. We must also deal with the reality that there is no real evidence that CO2 has any effect on climate and plenty of scientific rational to support the idea that the climate sensivity of CO2 is really zero.
willhaas,
“What we really need is a process that will efficiently convert any organic matter to a usable, easy to store and use fuel.”
Tax $$$$$ have been wasted on this effort for about 20 years or more, unfortunately the biofuels advocates have not come to grips with thermodynamics and economics . I have to admit that I even received consider remuneration on several projects mostly with private capital in this vain attempt, but not recently since it appears that private capital learned early what government employees have yet to realize.
Are you aware that the US Navy has purchased biofuel under Obama mandate at $26/gallon and even up to hundreds of dollars per gallon in the name of sustainability.
Hope Trump ends the nonsense.
And when the cop says “I smell alcohol” you just claim you were filling your tank.
And produce 50% more CO2 while doing it.
So if ethanol gives about 60% of the mpg that C6 – C12 gasoline gives, does that mean that its really only 8.2%? I worked in Brazil around 1980 when they subsided the difference in price for ethanol vs gasoline… I was lucky, I bought a gasoline car just by chance. Then when Brazil ran out of other peoples money, there were “ethanol cars” just parked by the side of many roads – abandoned and rusting. I was able to sell my gasoline car at the end of the project for 50% more than I paid.
Does this “Brazilian solution” involve clear-cutting the rest of the rainforest?
“We are not amused.”
Ha! Next they’ll be claiming Brazilians don’t have pubic hair!
Photosynthesis is a very good way to produce high value chemical products known as “food”, after humans spend millennia in finding and improving special crops and animals for this purpose.
However, using just to produce the basic commodity known as “energy” seems one of the stupidest idea on Earth, as long as you can do otherwise; and you can! It takes governments to have it happen: says it all.
How long could one grow sugar cane as a monoculture with substantial inputs of fertiliser and energy used for planting and harvesting, assuming that some poor serf doesn’t have to do it all by hand?
What will be the effect on biodiversity?
Will there be a risk of a fungal or bacterial disease killing off the cane, then oops! No fuel.
Also the Greens are great proponents of organic farming where one has to use fertility building crops in a rotation before growing exploitive crops such as wheat. How will they accept the disregard of all their principles in order to save a minimal amount of CO2?
Claim: sugarcane ethanol can replace 13.7% of global oil supply
Yes, and billions of gerbils on little wheels could supply that much energy, too. It wouldn’t be a good idea either.
Used to be that Greenies worried about the Amazon. Strange what mass hysteria can do.
So the Euronordics could have a little table sugar and some rum to wash it down with, the Virgin Islands in the Caribbean endured ~150 years of cane cultivation. Hiking in the clear pleasant forests around the untillable fringes of the overgrown plantations I got a glimpse of the islands’ aboriginal aboreals… a sustainable mix neither dense forest nor jungle nor desert, full of life. Reclaimed cane lands on the South and East sides of the islands are now dry thorny tangles, what soil is left gets carried away as loose dust and washout. Erosion is rampant. It wasn’t the cane itself so much as the clearing to make way for it. The islands I knew had been transformed by it, and not in a good way.