Spring 11 MASTER.indd - Thunderbird Magazine

VOLUTION
Decades before massive oil
discovery, nation taps the
power of sugarcane
Story and photos by Daryl James
An experimental
sugarcane fi eld borders
the Cane Technology
Center in Piracicaba,
about two hours north
of São Paulo, Brazil.
Thunderbird students
visited the research center
Jan. 13, 2011, to learn
about efforts to develop
new sugarcane varieties.
Brazilians had a joke about their overreliance on foreign oil
during the 1970s energy crisis. Venezuela and Argentina, their
neighbors to the north and south, both had oil. Brazil just needed
to find the elusive pipeline connecting the countries.
“It was a joke for 30 years,” Thunderbird Professor John Zerio,
Ph.D., tells his students in São Paulo on the opening day of a three-week
Winterim course on sustainability. “But Brazil never found huge amounts
of oil, and it was the best thing that ever happened.”
Left with few options, the emerging market looked inward and found a
sustainable energy source in the abundant sugarcane plantations that Portuguese
settlers first commercialized in the 1500s.
Decades before other countries started thinking about ethanol, Brazil
launched a biofuel revolution using the power of sugarcane in ways the
early colonists never imagined. The ethanol movement has taken hold since
then like nowhere else on the planet.
“Ethanol is embedded in the DNA of this country,” says Zerio, a Brazilian
native from São Paulo. “People here are proud of their sugarcane and the
sustainability it represents.”
Nearly half of the Brazilian vehicles operating in 2011 include flexible fuel
engines optimized to run on 100 percent ethanol or any mix of gasoline.
Every service station in the country sells domestic ethanol side-by-side with
other fuels, and regular gasoline includes 25 percent ethanol.
The programs have produced dramatic results. Brazil’s National Petroleum
Agency estimates that the country’s ethanol consumption surpassed
that of gasoline in the second half of 2008.
Brazil also produces electricity and other products from sugarcane without
jeopardizing the country’s status as the world’s No. 1 exporter of granulated
sugar. The alternate energy source means Brazilians have options when
oil prices surge — as they have in 2011 — or when sugar prices fluctuate.
Brazil carved out the energy niche without waiting for a pipeline discovery
between Venezuela and Argentina. But the joke took a twist in 2007
when Brazilian state oil company Petrobras announced a massive find off
the coast of Rio de Janeiro that could turn the country into a major oil exporter
within 10 years.
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