Sweetened or energized: the sugarcane dilemma

Renewable Energy Magazine
Thursday, 15 December 2011
Noor-Hal Cuellar

Ethanol has long been recognized as a high-quality transportation fuel, either in low or high-level gasoline blends (and is therefore not subject to a range of barriers faced by other alternatives). The paramount importance of sugarcane supply towards the sustained development of ethanol fuel industry in Brazil is well known. Looking in retrospective, it is still quite astonishing to discover how Brazil managed to take its competitive advantage as the world’s top producer of sugarcane towards an added value for one of its potential products (i.e. ethanol) to overcome the energetic world crisis in 1975. The government-created initiative, the National Ethanol Production Program (also known as Proalcool), boosted this industry’s development by subsidizing sugarcane farming as well as setting up the infrastructure to smooth the transition towards petrol replacement by ethanol. Mills would process sugarcane into ethanol, to be sold via gas stations in vehicles designed to work solely with it by carmakers.

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