The Oil Drum | Lessons from Brazil

107 comments on Lessons from Brazil

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AlanfromBigEasy on June 1, 2006 - 2:07am

The Secretary of Agriculture for Louisiana was on the local radio today. There is law before the legislature that any ethanol sold in Louisiana must come from in-state plants.

He went on for a bit on how much more energy efficent sugar cane was than corn as a source of ethanol. He mentioned briefly that it might be better to get some sugar out of the cane and use the residue (molasses) to make ethanol.

No numbers though.

I am anti-corn ethanol, but uncertain about sugar cane ethanol . If a source of oxygenated additive for gasoline is needed in polluted areas, using sugar cane ethanol is probably the best additive. A useful niche.

Beyond that I am uncertain.

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baka on June 1, 2006 - 5:04am

Alan,
if you have a subscription or other access, Nature has an article on New Orleans. Apparently some areas sank more than thought over the last few years.

Nature 441, 587-588 (1 June 2006) | doi:10.1038/441587a; Published online 31 May 2006
Space geodesy: Subsidence and flooding in New Orleans

A subsidence map of the city offers insight into the failure of the levees during Hurricane Katrina.

It has long been recognized that New Orleans is subsiding and is therefore susceptible to catastrophic flooding. Here we present a new subsidence map for the city, generated from space-based synthetic-aperture radar measurements, which reveals that parts of New Orleans underwent rapid subsidence in the three years before Hurricane Katrina struck in August 2005. One such area is next to the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet (MRGO) canal, where levees failed during the peak storm surge: the map indicates that this weakness could be explained by subsidence of a metre or more since their construction.

emphasis mine

"As global sea level is rising at an average rate of about 2 mm yr-1 (ref. 1), most of New Orleans is subsiding relative to the global mean sea level at an average rate of about 8 mm yr-1."

Nearly one centimetre a year!

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eric blair on June 1, 2006 - 8:44am

It has long been recognized that New Orleans is subsiding and is therefore susceptible to catastrophic flooding.

Such matters not to Alan. He's on record saying the only cities worth spending any ewffort on is NYC, San Fancisco and New Orleans.

Take energy and money from other non-failing places and prop up the failures.

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jokuhl on June 1, 2006 - 9:43am

Interesting choice of words..
"Prop up the failures"

Brings to mind the CinC himself and his gang, instead of a city that has suffered a great deal of national neglect, and in fact is a key piece of our cultural history, as well as an infrastructural base for the functioning of the Mississippi, our greatest export freight engine in the country. There has been plenty of poor development planning in N.O., but to call the city a 'failure' is particularly narrow.

I wonder if that phrase is also considered when you see bailouts of big businesses and industries that don't seem to be able to justify themselves in the 'free market', but get treated like national treasures, to the chagrin of better alternatives (Trucking and Air Freight vs Rail..)

I've heard Alan advocate for the support and reinvigoration of cities like N.O., SanFran and NY, but I never heard him say these were the only places deserving all of our Urban Development attentions. To the contrary, he has offered that making a few cities into examples of smarter rail and commuting options would help show other cities what's possible, and see numbers for how beneficial it would be.

So what would you call the Non-failing places?

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AlanfromBigEasy on June 1, 2006 - 12:14pm

I will find time to respond more fully later.

One of the three carless people that I evacuated in my car for Katrina was a Tulane student from Wisconsin. Needless to say I am in good standing with her parents and do not have to pick up the check when they visit.

Her mother recently mentioned that her view of small town Wisconsin had changed. They were driving to the store and she wondered aloud why they had to drive. "See, the houses are so far apart, you could have at least twice as many in there and we could all live closer together. And we could have sidewalks everywhere. I liked it better when I walked to the store in New Orleans. You don't meet or see anyone driving".

She has also told me how much she misses the St. Charles streetcar (as do I, open again in 2007) and how "great" it was to take it downtown.

Some few people listen to New Urbanist nerds (who still do not have it quite right, they STILL need New Orleans to learn from). More people learn by living and experiencing.

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jokuhl on June 1, 2006 - 12:32pm

Alan;
I just got my first visit to your city this weekend (Working on the ESPN Poker Tourny at Harrah's..talk about the belly of the beast).. and what a great place! I was staying and working right near the Riverside Market, and only walked while I was there, but the trolleys I saw were a great temptation, and an inspiring sight!

I lived in NYC for 19 years, and rode the MTA prodigiously, besides hoofing it. I built my daughter a 'Redbird' toybox for her first Christmas Gift.. those are the classic NYC '7' Trains that connect Flushing, Queens with Times Square, but I have to fill the other spot in her Toybox garage, and it might have to be a N.O. Trolley! The other option was a London Double-decker, but Red has already been taken, alas..

Bob Fiske

(Nice Job on the Website you linked us to yesterday! Made your points, but it wasn't too long to get through quickly. I didn't have a problem with 6000 Princes remark, though I suppose it could be inflammatory in some circles)

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Richard on June 4, 2006 - 7:10pm

Alan,

More people learn by living and experiencing.

You can learn for the price of a plane ticket to an average town in the south of France. Besides, it's fun. Welcome!

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AlanfromBigEasy on June 5, 2006 - 4:01pm

Dear Richard, I am spending as much money as possible here in New Orleans, we need it to survive and recover. Besides, I can get better food and music here than in France ! Thank You for the help that France has given. It is much appreciated !! The French come in and ask "What needs to be done ? What has FEMA missed or delayed ?" For example, Paribus bank is rebuilding five fire stations to give minimal coverage in the drowned areas. Although the US is a culinary desert, New Orleans has better food than France. Throw French peasants into the swamp, add African, Spanish, Native American influences, wait 250 years and see what results !

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neapolis on June 1, 2006 - 10:22am

I don't know about San Francisco and New Orleans, but New York City pays $13 billion more in federal taxes than it receives in federal spending -- even after 9/11! I'm not sure where you are, but it's more likely that New York is propping up where you live than vice versa.

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jkissing on June 6, 2006 - 4:13pm

Most places pay in more than they get out - how else can we fund our wars? Maybe farm states with low population and large subidies are an exception, but there is no reason to think NO is one, too.

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Robert Rapier on June 1, 2006 - 10:08am

He went on for a bit on how much more energy efficent sugar cane was than corn as a source of ethanol.

This certainly appears to be the case in Brazil. I never quite understood why the U.S. doesn't have sugar cane ethanol plants in places where we grow sugar cane. The claimed EROI is much better. Maybe the process is too dependent upon manual labor?

I have taken exception to some aspects of the USDA's corn ethanol studies, but one thing they have done a decent job on is surveying ethanol plants to determine actual energy inputs and outputs. I would like to see something like that done for Brazilian sugar cane ethanol plants, so we can get a feel for the true EROI. For example, do most Brazilian ethanol plants burn bagasse for steam? Or is this a rarity, yet the basis for the EROI claims?

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GeoPoet on June 1, 2006 - 10:49am

Robert -

Back in the early 1900's, sugar cane was grown from Mississippi to the Rio Grande Valley, basically following the Gulf Coast. Sugarland is a suburb of Houston, home of Tom Delay (vomitous mass) and formerly Domino Sugar. The principal crop in most of the coastal counties of Texas and Louisiana was in fact sugar cane.

With the rise in the US dollar and cheap imports, guess what happened to the sugar cane industry? So, tariffs and subsidies were put in place. The net result is that it is often more profitable NOT to grow your cane.....

But the land and climate along the Gulf Coast is well suited to this crop, and we have farmed it intensively before. But not with sustainable rotations - just chemical inputs.

I watched a special on the Brazilian ethanol plants - they do use bagasse for steam routinely, and they also rotate crops to replenish their fields and avoid overuse of chemical inputs to help EROI. And yes, the waste is used as cattle feed to further offset cost.

Brazil is also researching using their "pencil plant" as an ethanol input. This is a very hardy and fast growing succulent, with a very high sugar content and loads of sap. It grows very well in extremely marginal soils, and is often the first plant to "fill back" in clear cuts in Brazil.

There is a very similar setup south of Lafayette Louisiana on I-49, left over from the late 1970's. This plant was also fired with bagasse, and the large ethanol stills are all lined up along the entrance to the mill. I walked through it about 4 years ago, just to see how it was put together before I built my personal still. It was abandoned when the bottom fell out of the oil industry in the 1980's.

Just maybe somebody will retool it and fire her up again soon, especially if Louisiana passes their "only Louisiana ethanol" law.

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phineas gage on June 1, 2006 - 11:19am

I wonder if sugar cane has taken a beating bc/ it competes with corn syrup in this country. With the heavy corn subsidies, corn syrup is artificially cheap. Maybe if corn were not so heavily subsidized farmers could grow sugar cane in the gulf area profitably.

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Nate Hagens on June 2, 2006 - 12:40am

i think you are right - get rid of all ag subsidies and let the grain mix change - we'd see less corn and lots more amaranth, switchgrass, etc.

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oilmanbob on June 2, 2006 - 3:05pm

the other subsidy that sugar has enjoyed is slave labor. Sugarland is also home to 4 units of the Texas Department of Corrections and the prison system not only operated its own farms but also rented the prisoners out to local plantations. American Sugar in south Florida imported Dominican and Haitian "guest workers" for the same purpose. Cuba had legal slavery until the 1870's and the Cuban workers from the fields were Castro's biggest supporters. Unless we plan to make semi-slaves and work them to death in the cane fields, sugar cane ethanol is a pipe dream.

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MikeCotton on June 1, 2006 - 7:39pm

Sugarland is/was the home of Imperial Sugar.

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Robert Rapier on June 1, 2006 - 9:24pm

I lived near Sugarland for a couple of years (in Bay City) but I did not know that. I always wondered why they called it Sugarland.

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Todd on June 1, 2006 - 2:11pm

Robert,

You might want to pose that question to Milton Maciel on the Energy Resources forum. He is the reigning organic, Brazilian sugar cane/ethanol expert there.

From what I've read of his past posts (I just lurk there), he has a wide range of excellent technical knowledge.

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SocraticGadfly on June 3, 2006 - 4:05am

Brazil has one other big difference compared to us.

It's a tropical nation. Re the higher efficiency of sugarcane vs. corn for ethanol, you can grow cane all over the place in Brazil. You can't in the U.S.

You can grow sugarbeets in Illinois and Iowa, to be sure. But you're not gonna grow cane there, and I have no idea on EROEI, etc. on sugarbeets vs. either corn or sugarcane.

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AlanfromBigEasy on June 3, 2006 - 9:51am

I have sugarcane growing in my yard. Sugarcane is a viable crop in South Florida, South Louisiana (still grown here), South Texas & Hawaii (5 plantations left).

Sugarbeet is a less efficient producer of sugar than sugarcane.

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