Lessons from Brazil
Posted by Robert Rapier on June 1, 2006 - 1:46am
Topic: Alternative energy
Tags: biofuel, brazil, ethanol, politics [list all tags]
The following claim from Tom Daschle and Vinod Khosla appeared in their recent New York Times editorial, Miles Per Cob (now behind a pay wall):
As Brazil's "energy independence miracle" proves, an aggressive strategy of investing in petroleum substitutes like ethanol can end dependence on imported oil.
You may have also recently seen Dan Rather's report The Ethanol Solution, in which he gushes over Brazil's ethanol success and wonders why we don't heed their example. Perhaps you heard Frank Sesno on CNN's We Were Warned ask why the U.S. is not following Brazil's example. The mainstream media have it figured out. The politicians have it figured out. Many ordinary Americans have it figured out. We just need to apply the Brazilian example to the U.S., and we will end our dependence on foreign oil. But is it as simple as that? Let's investigate.
According to Per Capita Oil Consumption and Production, oil consumption in Brazil is 4.2 barrels per person per year. In the U.S., oil consumption is 27 barrels per person per year, 6.4 times as much per person as Brazil's.
However, we do produce much more oil per person than Brazil. Each year the U.S. produces 11 barrels per person, compared to 3.35 barrels per person for Brazil. In order to achieve energy independence, the gap between demand and production must be closed. Brazil has to close a gap of 0.85 barrels per person per year (4.2 - 3.35). They produce sufficient ethanol to close this gap, and therefore they are energy independent. The U.S., on the other hand, has to close a gap of 16 barrels per person per year. The U.S. gap in production/demand is almost 19 times greater than the production/demand gap in Brazil.
Clearly, the U.S. has quite a large gap to close. But this is a difficult proposition. Not only do we use more energy per person, but the population of the U.S. is 110 million greater than that of Brazil. According to my calculations, we can't possibly hope to close the production/demand gap with grain ethanol. Others have shown the futility of closing that gap with cellulosic ethanol here and here.
The Real Lesson from Brazil
Yes, Brazil has in fact "figured it out" with respect to energy independence. But the reason they achieved energy independence is primarily because of their frugal energy usage, not because of ethanol. Increase their energy usage to U.S. levels, and the "energy independence miracle" would quickly vanish. This is the factor that the media and the politicians have overlooked. On the other hand, if the U.S. had the same per capita energy consumption as Brazil, we would be net oil exporters. In fact, our per capita energy consumption could be 11 barrels per person per year - triple the consumption of Brazil - and our production and demand would be in balance. We would be energy independent.
The real lesson from Brazil is that energy independence can be achieved by slashing our energy usage. It is simply not realistic to expect the U.S. to achieve energy independence with biofuels - unless we sharply curb our consumption. The next time you hear someone say we should emulate Brazil's example, ask them to calculate the amount of ethanol this would require, and ask them how we are supposed to produce that much. It is time to start demanding details from the "Brazil believers". In doing so, we may convey the gravity of the situation to those who think ethanol will lead us to energy independence.
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.
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!
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.
"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?
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.
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)
You can learn for the price of a plane ticket to an average town in the south of France. Besides, it's fun. Welcome!
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?
RR
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.
RR
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.
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.
Sugarbeet is a less efficient producer of sugar than sugarcane.
I do wonder whether it comes out ahead of corn or not, at least on sugar. Do you have info on that?
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They probably got their talking points from ADM, though.
Sigh... when is America going to figure out that there is more to gain by conservation than any new oil field, new technology and any alternative source put together.
I have speculated on this as well. I think if you took all of these subsidies, and instead gave them to consumers for various energy conservation programs (for example, a sliding rebate depending on the fuel efficiency of the car you drive), the benefit would be enormous. We would see a dramatic drop in our oil imports.
RR
biking instead of driving has huge EROI.
Vaclac Smil shows that the EROI of planting root vegetables is 20:1 to 25:1 - thats the personal energy expended to the calories harvested. Once we have a real energy crisis, people will start to view the world in an energy lens rather than a dollar lens. Its what we evolved to do.
I think that we should look at the energy cost and money cost of producing more energy vs. saving energy (with some adjustsment for type of energy).
Consider some of the following alternatives. Which should we do ?
- Drill a dozen wells into depleted field that will each ooze 3 barrels/day for 15 years.
- Build another wind turbine farm
- Add hydroelectric generator to existing dam that will produce power 11% of the time for 100+ years.
- Build new distillery & make more ethanol from corn
- Extend the "Red Line" subway in Los Angeles to UCLA and carry an extra 140,000 pax/day
- Electrify Union Pacific railroad on line from Los Angeles to Omaha. This is 4% of total US ton-miles (SWAG).
- Build a coal to liquids plant and make 100,000 b/d diesel
- Build a new nuke
- Build & install 300,000 solar water heaters
I think EROEI is a valid criteria to compare these projects (as well as $ & environmental impact). Some are clear winners, some are marginal, some are losers. All take energy, materials and money.But it is still not energy positive to bicycle in itself since it still cost a tiny ammount of wear, road space and cornflakes.
Investing in better efficiency should be compared to investing in increased production. But in reality it is very often different organizations that can do different kind of investments. They are interconnected by the ammount of capital in our economy, sometimes common owners, banks and laws and regulations but that still gives clumsy control for global optimization and I think fine tuned optimization is a futile goal.
I would like to mostly use EROEI for schemes that are supposed to produce net energy. If they do not produce a positive EROEI they are advocated with incorrect marketing. For the rest I am content with ROI including a reasonable fuel price prognosis.
But that may be since I am greedy and would like to live in a rich country both before and after peak oil. I advocate short and medium term negative EROEI infrastructure investments if they are cheap to build today and cheap to run post peak oil, otherwise some Swedish railway lines that will be nice to have will probably not be built. (If the opinion I got about that were correct, I have not calculated it myself. )
The key to understanding this persistent blindness is to ask "more to gain for whom"? Sure, the average joe on the street would be better off with a energy-frugal society. He might not get to have his McTruck or McHouse, but his quality of life would be overall much improved (lower taxes, lower cost of living, lower pollution, lower threat of terrorism, etc). But Joe American doesn't make these decisions. He eats the dogfood he is served. And the power elite (in both senses of the term; they are much the same group of people) stand to lose power, position, and wealth if we shift from a centralized fossil-fuel economy to a distributed, renewable, low-energy economy.
While it was clear that Rather and Sesno thought we should emulate Brazil, neither came out and bluntly stated this. They left the implication there by not asking critical questions about why Brazil was able to accomplish what they have. Far worse, in my opinion, was the Khosla/Daschle editorial. They flat out assured us that we could be energy independent if we merely go down the path that Brazil has set. That is grossly irresponsible.
RR
Excellent article as always. I just returned from Brazil, and while they are frugal, I don't think the lifestyle is that different from ours. What market forces are causing them to conserve?
The yearly wage in Brazil is $1,725
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_minimum_wage
A gallon of gasoline costs $4.10
http://www.brazzilmag.com/content/view/3825/53/
The yearly wage in the US is $10,712
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_minimum_wage
A gallon of gas costs $2.80 where I am.
So a Brazilian purchasing only gas could buy around 431 gallons a year, while an american could purchase over 3,000. If we taxed gasoline to where the market were similar gas would cost around $25 a gallon. That would make more people walk/bike/public transport and drive less when they do drive. I am not advocating this I am only pointing out the reason for their lower consumption. They have less money percapita and gas costs more per unit.
I do think somewhere between where we are now and $25 a gallon we could tax fuel and
1 Electrify Rail/improve mass transit
2 Invest in Alternative Energy
3 Fund credible research programs for cellulosic/biodiesel
I had a blast in Brazil, I had to more than I do here and I bought a bike and had to wait for a bus here and there but it was not that bad. When my fiance is in the US she complains that she does not have the freedom to go to the store or movies...everything is to far to walk and the mass transit sucks.
Matt
Hope you got to experience Carnival.
I think it's one hell of a show.