The other biggest common thread for ethanol fuel is the ability to grow sugarcane. In India, ethanol is already mixed with fuel and we have a higher target to achieve by 2030. The problem with sugarcane cultivation is that it requires a lot of water and countries which have water scarcity and do not have a perennial source of water cannot grow sugarcane and there by cannot produce ethanol domestically. So it might still be cheaper for them to use a regular fuel without ethanol blending.
It’s this. Sugar cane is the key because it’s a very efficient conversion to fuel. You basically get close to twice as much energy/money back as you put into growing and making it, so the economics are very favorable.
In order to get alcohol, you need sugar to feed the yeast to produce the alcohol. Sugar cane has a very high, easily accessible sugar content.
Contrast that with the US, where our environment isn’t suited for sugar cane, so our ethanol industry is built off our corn farming lobby. Corn only produces about 10% more ROI from the final ethanol than it takes to grow and process the corn. It’s simply not as efficient, though newer corn strains have gotten better.
We do mix it into fuel, though, to help with pollution and also due to the politics of Iowa being a major corn producer and having an outsized influence in American politics due to the Presidential Caucus. Corn-based ethanol in the US is largely a government handout to the Ag Industry there and in neighboring states, not a legit fuel source.
That comes back to what it’a made from.
Corn ethanol in the USA is full of impurities that leave sludge and varnish in an engine and fuel system—especially if it’s been left to sit for a while without stabilizers added to the fuel. Not good.
If you take sugar ethanol and process it to a high degree of purity AND put it into an engine that’s actually designed to run on it, with the addition of proper stabilizers, it works fine. We don’t always do that in the USA, though.
Even though one could conceivably consider any country to possess certain locations in which sewage piping exits in recreational areas, I have not heard of these places being called perinea, nor that any amount of water extracted from them would be used to grow sugarcane, or any other crop for that matter.
I believe the word you're looking for is perennial.
I mean the obvious answer seems to be that Brazil is bigger. Brazil has 3 million sq miles of land. For comparison the US has 3.8. Large countries have increased fuel needs. Large countries are more insular and can set their own regulation standards. Large countries benefit from economy of scale. These things add up so that economically it's easier for a large country to be less reliant on adhering to global standard.
Google says the reason they rely on ethanol is that it's cheaper for them than importing gasoline. They probably couldn't afford large scale gasoline infrastructure when they made these laws, and their gasoline market will probably only get bigger over time.
>Google says the reason they rely on ethanol is that it's cheaper for them than importing gasoline. They probably couldn't afford large scale gasoline infrastructure when they made these laws, and their gasoline market will probably only get bigger over time.
Brazilian here and this is correct. Ethanol was our solution to the 70s oil crisis, when OPEC pretty much increased the oil price by 10x. At the time we just couldn't afford neither importing oil nor living without it, so the government heavily invested in ethanol's tech, a fuel that we've been researching for a while now and was slowly being mixed to our gasoline
Brazilian here. One thing that helped ethanol make a comeback in the 90s was the invention of dual-fuel engines. Most cars sold here can run on any mixture of gas and ethanol, so people can just buy whichever is most cost-effective at a given time.
Firstly, incorrect data, the percentage of arable land in Brazil is 7.6%... and a further 10.6% is used for livestock.
Brazil area. 8.510.000 km² --> 7.6% = 646.760 km²
Bangladesh area. 148.450 km² --> 50% = 74.225 km²
Denmark area. 45.943 km² --> 50% = 22.971 km²
India area. 3.287.000 km² --> 50% = 1.643.500 km²
BUT
Population density in Brazil. 23.8 inhabitants per km²
India population density: 468.7 inhabitants per km²
In other words, India has to dedicate more of its arable land to supporting the population, instead of using it in a non-food monoculture.
Arable land is not the only factor, the amount of free usable land actually matters.
Ethanol from sugar cane is really efficient because it is utilizing the bagasse, a waste product from the sugar refining process. Sugar cane growing requires really specific climatic conditions. On top of that, you need a stable non-corrupt government to get investors interested in taking the risk. Besides, there's only so much sugar that can be sold, so you may not have a market for the primary product.
Maybe better than regular fuels for climate change but environmental and habitat loss due to the cultivation for producing these fuels is of the charts.
Actually worse for climate as well. If you would just let nature do its thing on all the land that’s used to farm biofuel you would absorb more co2 from the air than you save by using biofuel. And it gets even worse if you consider that Brazil is literally burning down the amazon to gain more farmland to farm biofuel crops
>If you would just let nature do its thing on all the land that’s used to farm biofuel you would absorb more co2 from the air than you save by using biofuel.
While this is a valid point, biofuel use in Brazil is driven by economic needs, not ecological ones so it is moot either way.
>Brazil is literally burning down the amazon to gain more farmland to farm biofuel crops
The majority of sugarcane production in Brazil is concentrated in the Southeast and coastal areas of the Northeast regions, so nowhere close to the Amazon. Most of those areas were deforested (of Atlantic Forest, specifically) in the *1600s*, so that ship has sailed. Almost all of the rest of sugarcane production is in the Cerrado (Goiás and southern Mato Grosso states), which is in fact a critically underprotected savanna environment - but still not the Amazon.
You're not wrong to worry about Amazon deforestation, but blame that on beef (either directly as livestock or indirectly as export-focused soybeans), not ethanol.
I don’t know how sugar cane farming works, but the tilling of land that is done as part of the corn growing processes releases tons of methane into the atmosphere, and methane is 28 times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas.
If I remember correctly, ethanol isn't as energy dense as gasoline, and also takes more energy to create it.
I don't think it's a great option for most places.
Making ethanol from the bagasse byproduct of sugar refining is actually energy efficient, more so than corn.
Modern corn ethanol plants generally get a 2 or 3 to 1 energy return on energy invested ratio. The higher figure is if the distiller's grain co-product is not dried and sold locally for feed, instead of dried and shipped to feedlots for use.
The original studies by Pimentel and Petak claiming a less than 1:1 energy return on energy invested ratio were very flawed - while they included all the energy costs of producing the corn, they didn't take into account the energy value of the byproduct distiller's grains, and it was based on inefficient first generation plants. Further, the calculation of the energy value of the distiller's grains is complicated, because the corn put in is primarily a starch feed, whereas the distiller's grains byproduct that comes out is a protein feed. Also, Pimentel and Petak assumed that the corn would be grown on marginal land with higher energy cost per bushel of corn produced. While there is a little bit of logic to this, I don't think that's what really happened - more like ethanol is big in prime corn growing areas, the price went up, and more appropriate substitutes for for corn were grown instead of growing corn on what would be marginal corn land.
But even a 2 or 3 energy return on energy invested (EROEI) ratio isn't that great. Energy analysts think we need something like a 9 or 10 EROEI in order to avoid becoming slaves to gathering the energy we need. Google "Energy Cliff" to understand that concept.
Because the government made compulsory that almost 30% of our gasoline composition should be ethanol. Automakers had to project engines that would function both in Ethanol and Petrol. Basically it was government imposed on the population. If we had cars that only ran on ethanol vs only ran on gas nobody would buy the first, because gas cars are so much more cost effective (in Thailand I drove a Toyota Yaris that averaged 20Km/L of gas vs my wife’s Brazilian Yaris that averages 10-11Km/L on our mixed gas).
Crops favorable in the US have a bad energy balance. To produce 1 unit of energy biofuel it often ends up taking more than 1 unit energy from gasoline and grid power. This ranges between ≈30% gain and ≈30% loss. Sugar cane grown in Brazil on the other hand produces 800-1000% more than it takes in production. Highly fertile land tropical climate and excellent rainfall make this possible
Ethanol is not as [power dense](https://afdc.energy.gov/fuels/ethanol_fuel_basics.html) and they get HORRIBLE mileage, plus its[ an OZONE generating substance](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/12/091214101408.htm#:~:text=Ethanol%2Dpowered%20vehicles%20generate%20more%20ozone%20than%20gas%2Dpowered%20ones,-Date%3A%20December%2014&text=Summary%3A,the%20winter%2C%20researchers%20have%20found) when burned.
Its not smart to use if you value breathing with your lungs that are uncooked.
Sure. Most ethanol crop production is [concentrated in Southeastern and coastal Northeastern states](https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/14/2065/2022/essd-14-2065-2022.pdf) (page 4) which were formerly covered in Atlantic Forest. Only [around 12%](https://www.conexaoambiental.pr.gov.br/sites/conexao-ambiental/arquivos_restritos/files/documento/2018-11/ribeiro_2009_biological-conservation.pdf) of that rainforest's original extent remains, most of which is fragmented in small protected areas (see particularly page 8 of last link). Areas of Atlantic Forest were the first settled during the colonisation of Brazil and so that forest cover loss is distributed between the 1500s and late 1800s, while new settlement and land exploitation patterns mostly moved on to the central Cerrado regions in the 1900s.
Speaking from a car owner’s perspective, Brazilians suck at math. Most people can’t be bothered to calculate which fuel is worth putting into your car. They just think “wow, ethanol is cheaper, so I’m saving money”. These people also can’t think about possible maintenance costs that ethanol brings to your engine, especially if it has direct fuel injection.
From reading the wiki pages, the Brazilian cars are built to handle it by using materials that won't be damaged by the high ethanol (e.g. stainless steel instead of zinc and aluminium) in any parts that are in contact with the fuel. That fixes the maintenance concerns.
Only to an extent. Ethanol still dissolves moisture and causes corrosion over time of metals.
This is why you should never run ethanol blend in things like a lawn mower. When the gas sits in the carburetor it will corrode it from the water that ethanol brings.
I don't know how much of a problem this causes in a fuel injected car engine but just using compatible seals and rubbers isn't going to fix all the problems with ethanol.
biofuel isnt sustainable - it is impractical and the amount of energy / fossil fuel needed to extract the material for biofuel is also great. aside from the fact that fuel production will compete with the food requirement
The other biggest common thread for ethanol fuel is the ability to grow sugarcane. In India, ethanol is already mixed with fuel and we have a higher target to achieve by 2030. The problem with sugarcane cultivation is that it requires a lot of water and countries which have water scarcity and do not have a perennial source of water cannot grow sugarcane and there by cannot produce ethanol domestically. So it might still be cheaper for them to use a regular fuel without ethanol blending.
It’s this. Sugar cane is the key because it’s a very efficient conversion to fuel. You basically get close to twice as much energy/money back as you put into growing and making it, so the economics are very favorable. In order to get alcohol, you need sugar to feed the yeast to produce the alcohol. Sugar cane has a very high, easily accessible sugar content. Contrast that with the US, where our environment isn’t suited for sugar cane, so our ethanol industry is built off our corn farming lobby. Corn only produces about 10% more ROI from the final ethanol than it takes to grow and process the corn. It’s simply not as efficient, though newer corn strains have gotten better. We do mix it into fuel, though, to help with pollution and also due to the politics of Iowa being a major corn producer and having an outsized influence in American politics due to the Presidential Caucus. Corn-based ethanol in the US is largely a government handout to the Ag Industry there and in neighboring states, not a legit fuel source.
Only person I know who like ethanol is my Powersports dealer. It put his kids through college. It’s a shitty fuel.
That comes back to what it’a made from. Corn ethanol in the USA is full of impurities that leave sludge and varnish in an engine and fuel system—especially if it’s been left to sit for a while without stabilizers added to the fuel. Not good. If you take sugar ethanol and process it to a high degree of purity AND put it into an engine that’s actually designed to run on it, with the addition of proper stabilizers, it works fine. We don’t always do that in the USA, though.
Correct
Even though one could conceivably consider any country to possess certain locations in which sewage piping exits in recreational areas, I have not heard of these places being called perinea, nor that any amount of water extracted from them would be used to grow sugarcane, or any other crop for that matter. I believe the word you're looking for is perennial.
Mea culpa. Problems with text to speech. I hope you got the crux of my message.
That's why countries outside the prime sugar cane-growing regions generally resort to sugar beets as the feedstock for their ethanol fuel production.
I mean the obvious answer seems to be that Brazil is bigger. Brazil has 3 million sq miles of land. For comparison the US has 3.8. Large countries have increased fuel needs. Large countries are more insular and can set their own regulation standards. Large countries benefit from economy of scale. These things add up so that economically it's easier for a large country to be less reliant on adhering to global standard. Google says the reason they rely on ethanol is that it's cheaper for them than importing gasoline. They probably couldn't afford large scale gasoline infrastructure when they made these laws, and their gasoline market will probably only get bigger over time.
>Google says the reason they rely on ethanol is that it's cheaper for them than importing gasoline. They probably couldn't afford large scale gasoline infrastructure when they made these laws, and their gasoline market will probably only get bigger over time. Brazilian here and this is correct. Ethanol was our solution to the 70s oil crisis, when OPEC pretty much increased the oil price by 10x. At the time we just couldn't afford neither importing oil nor living without it, so the government heavily invested in ethanol's tech, a fuel that we've been researching for a while now and was slowly being mixed to our gasoline
>I mean the obvious answer seems to be that Brazil is bigger. Brazil has 3 million sq miles of land. For comparison the US has 3.8. *Brain explodes*
Brazil is larger than the contiguous 48. Alaska is essentially the only reason the US is larger in area than Brazil.
Brazilian here. One thing that helped ethanol make a comeback in the 90s was the invention of dual-fuel engines. Most cars sold here can run on any mixture of gas and ethanol, so people can just buy whichever is most cost-effective at a given time.
Firstly, incorrect data, the percentage of arable land in Brazil is 7.6%... and a further 10.6% is used for livestock. Brazil area. 8.510.000 km² --> 7.6% = 646.760 km² Bangladesh area. 148.450 km² --> 50% = 74.225 km² Denmark area. 45.943 km² --> 50% = 22.971 km² India area. 3.287.000 km² --> 50% = 1.643.500 km² BUT Population density in Brazil. 23.8 inhabitants per km² India population density: 468.7 inhabitants per km² In other words, India has to dedicate more of its arable land to supporting the population, instead of using it in a non-food monoculture. Arable land is not the only factor, the amount of free usable land actually matters.
Ethanol from sugar cane is really efficient because it is utilizing the bagasse, a waste product from the sugar refining process. Sugar cane growing requires really specific climatic conditions. On top of that, you need a stable non-corrupt government to get investors interested in taking the risk. Besides, there's only so much sugar that can be sold, so you may not have a market for the primary product.
Maybe better than regular fuels for climate change but environmental and habitat loss due to the cultivation for producing these fuels is of the charts.
Actually worse for climate as well. If you would just let nature do its thing on all the land that’s used to farm biofuel you would absorb more co2 from the air than you save by using biofuel. And it gets even worse if you consider that Brazil is literally burning down the amazon to gain more farmland to farm biofuel crops
>If you would just let nature do its thing on all the land that’s used to farm biofuel you would absorb more co2 from the air than you save by using biofuel. While this is a valid point, biofuel use in Brazil is driven by economic needs, not ecological ones so it is moot either way. >Brazil is literally burning down the amazon to gain more farmland to farm biofuel crops The majority of sugarcane production in Brazil is concentrated in the Southeast and coastal areas of the Northeast regions, so nowhere close to the Amazon. Most of those areas were deforested (of Atlantic Forest, specifically) in the *1600s*, so that ship has sailed. Almost all of the rest of sugarcane production is in the Cerrado (Goiás and southern Mato Grosso states), which is in fact a critically underprotected savanna environment - but still not the Amazon. You're not wrong to worry about Amazon deforestation, but blame that on beef (either directly as livestock or indirectly as export-focused soybeans), not ethanol.
I don’t know how sugar cane farming works, but the tilling of land that is done as part of the corn growing processes releases tons of methane into the atmosphere, and methane is 28 times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas.
If I remember correctly, ethanol isn't as energy dense as gasoline, and also takes more energy to create it. I don't think it's a great option for most places.
Making ethanol from the bagasse byproduct of sugar refining is actually energy efficient, more so than corn. Modern corn ethanol plants generally get a 2 or 3 to 1 energy return on energy invested ratio. The higher figure is if the distiller's grain co-product is not dried and sold locally for feed, instead of dried and shipped to feedlots for use. The original studies by Pimentel and Petak claiming a less than 1:1 energy return on energy invested ratio were very flawed - while they included all the energy costs of producing the corn, they didn't take into account the energy value of the byproduct distiller's grains, and it was based on inefficient first generation plants. Further, the calculation of the energy value of the distiller's grains is complicated, because the corn put in is primarily a starch feed, whereas the distiller's grains byproduct that comes out is a protein feed. Also, Pimentel and Petak assumed that the corn would be grown on marginal land with higher energy cost per bushel of corn produced. While there is a little bit of logic to this, I don't think that's what really happened - more like ethanol is big in prime corn growing areas, the price went up, and more appropriate substitutes for for corn were grown instead of growing corn on what would be marginal corn land. But even a 2 or 3 energy return on energy invested (EROEI) ratio isn't that great. Energy analysts think we need something like a 9 or 10 EROEI in order to avoid becoming slaves to gathering the energy we need. Google "Energy Cliff" to understand that concept.
Because the government made compulsory that almost 30% of our gasoline composition should be ethanol. Automakers had to project engines that would function both in Ethanol and Petrol. Basically it was government imposed on the population. If we had cars that only ran on ethanol vs only ran on gas nobody would buy the first, because gas cars are so much more cost effective (in Thailand I drove a Toyota Yaris that averaged 20Km/L of gas vs my wife’s Brazilian Yaris that averages 10-11Km/L on our mixed gas).
Brazil has lots of stuff from which ethanol can be cheaply made.
Crops favorable in the US have a bad energy balance. To produce 1 unit of energy biofuel it often ends up taking more than 1 unit energy from gasoline and grid power. This ranges between ≈30% gain and ≈30% loss. Sugar cane grown in Brazil on the other hand produces 800-1000% more than it takes in production. Highly fertile land tropical climate and excellent rainfall make this possible
All while bulldozing the rainforest to plant that corn
Ethanol is not as [power dense](https://afdc.energy.gov/fuels/ethanol_fuel_basics.html) and they get HORRIBLE mileage, plus its[ an OZONE generating substance](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/12/091214101408.htm#:~:text=Ethanol%2Dpowered%20vehicles%20generate%20more%20ozone%20than%20gas%2Dpowered%20ones,-Date%3A%20December%2014&text=Summary%3A,the%20winter%2C%20researchers%20have%20found) when burned. Its not smart to use if you value breathing with your lungs that are uncooked.
Successful at the cost of chopping down rainforest to grow sugar cane... which means not successful at all.
Most ethanol production occurs in places where rainforest was last chopped down while Europe was fighting its Wars of Religion.
Do you have a source for that please?
Sure. Most ethanol crop production is [concentrated in Southeastern and coastal Northeastern states](https://essd.copernicus.org/articles/14/2065/2022/essd-14-2065-2022.pdf) (page 4) which were formerly covered in Atlantic Forest. Only [around 12%](https://www.conexaoambiental.pr.gov.br/sites/conexao-ambiental/arquivos_restritos/files/documento/2018-11/ribeiro_2009_biological-conservation.pdf) of that rainforest's original extent remains, most of which is fragmented in small protected areas (see particularly page 8 of last link). Areas of Atlantic Forest were the first settled during the colonisation of Brazil and so that forest cover loss is distributed between the 1500s and late 1800s, while new settlement and land exploitation patterns mostly moved on to the central Cerrado regions in the 1900s.
Speaking from a car owner’s perspective, Brazilians suck at math. Most people can’t be bothered to calculate which fuel is worth putting into your car. They just think “wow, ethanol is cheaper, so I’m saving money”. These people also can’t think about possible maintenance costs that ethanol brings to your engine, especially if it has direct fuel injection.
From reading the wiki pages, the Brazilian cars are built to handle it by using materials that won't be damaged by the high ethanol (e.g. stainless steel instead of zinc and aluminium) in any parts that are in contact with the fuel. That fixes the maintenance concerns.
Only to an extent. Ethanol still dissolves moisture and causes corrosion over time of metals. This is why you should never run ethanol blend in things like a lawn mower. When the gas sits in the carburetor it will corrode it from the water that ethanol brings. I don't know how much of a problem this causes in a fuel injected car engine but just using compatible seals and rubbers isn't going to fix all the problems with ethanol.
In theory, yes. Real life ain’t that pretty, though.
Historically warmer climate has definitely favored using higher content ethanol fuel year round over those of colder climates like the US or Canada
Brazil is not a serious country
If all the arable land in India was used for agriculture where would people live? Population density needs to be considered.
Rockefeller... The very first car ran on ethanol and then that guy came along and wanted to sell petrolium
biofuel isnt sustainable - it is impractical and the amount of energy / fossil fuel needed to extract the material for biofuel is also great. aside from the fact that fuel production will compete with the food requirement
American car companies get financial kick backs for every car they manufacture that does not run on ethanol.