[Dialogue] The Energy Harvest

[FacilitationFla at aol.com]

The Energy Harvest  
Thomas Friedman.  
Any time that OPEC got a little too  overzealous in pushing up oil prices 
back in the 1970’s, the legendary Saudi oil  minister Sheik Ahmed Zaki Yamani was 
fond of telling his colleagues: Remember,  the Stone Age didn’t end because 
we ran out of  stones. 
What he meant was that the Stone Age ended because people  invented 
alternative tools. The oil age is also not going to end because we run  out of oil. It 
will end because the price of oil goes so high that people invent  
alternatives. Mr. Yamani was warning his colleagues not to get too greedy and  stimulate 
those alternatives. 
Too late — oil at $70 a barrel has done just that. One of  the most promising 
of those alternatives is ethanol, an alcohol fuel made from  corn, sugar cane 
or any biomass. I came to Brazil to try to better grasp what is real and  
what is not in the ethanol story, because no country has done more to pioneer  
sugar ethanol than Brazil. 
My impression, after talking to a range of Brazilian  experts, is that not 
only is ethanol for real, but we have not even begun to tap  its full potential. 
With just a few technological breakthroughs,  Brazil really could be the  
Saudi  Arabia of sugar and we could actually achieve  that energy dream of 
getting “barrels from bushels.”   
Since the 1970’s oil shocks, Brazil has, with  lots of trial and error, made 
ethanol part of its daily life. It hits you the  minute you drive into a gas 
station in São Paulo, where you need two things: a credit  card and a 
calculator. In rough numbers, sugar ethanol now sells here at a  little over $2 a 
gallon and gasoline at a little more than $4 a gallon. Because  sugar ethanol gets 
only about 70 percent of the mileage of gasoline, drivers  here do the math 
each day and figure out if ethanol is at least 30 percent less  than the price 
of gasoline. If it is, many will fill ’er up with sugar  cane. 
Brazilians have that luxury because there are 34,000 gas  stations here that 
offer both gasoline and ethanol (compared with around 700 in  the U.S.) and 
because 70 percent of new  cars sold here can run on either gasoline or sugar 
ethanol. As a result,  Brazil has replaced about 40 percent  of its gasoline 
consumption with sugar ethanol. 
I visited the Cosan sugar mill northwest of São Paulo, Brazil’s largest, 
where you fly in  over an ocean of green sugar cane. The cane is harvested onto 
big lorries and  trucked to the Cosan distillery. There, the juice is extracted 
and converted to  either crystal sugar or ethanol. The remaining cane waste — 
called bagasse — is  used to fuel huge steam boilers that produce enough 
electricity to both power  the refining process and leave a surplus to be sold back 
to the  grid. 
It’s important to understand this process to appreciate  just how “much more 
energy we could get from sugar cane” with just a few more  breakthroughs, 
explained Plinio Mario Nastari, one of Brazil’s top  ethanol consults. 
Think of each stalk of sugar cane as containing three  sources of energy. 
First, the juice extracted from the cane is already giving us  ethanol and sugar. 
Second, the bagasse is already heating very low-technology,  low-pressure 
boilers, giving us electricity. But if Brazil’s  refiners converted to new 
high-pressure boilers, you could get three times as  much electricity. 
Finally, when the cane is harvested the tops and leaves  are often just left 
in the field. But this biomass is rich in cellulose, the  carbohydrate that 
makes up the walls of plant cells. If the sugar locked away in  cellulose also 
could be unlocked — cheaply and easily by a chemical process —  this biomass 
could also produce tons of sugar ethanol. There is now a race on to  find that 
process. 
A breakthrough is expected within five years, and when  that happens it will 
be possible to extract “more than double” the amount of  ethanol from each 
sugar stalk, said José Luiz Oliverio, a senior V.P. at Dedini,  the Brazilian 
industrial giant, which has a pilot cellulosic ethanol  project. 
I asked Brazilian experts what they’d do if they were the  U.S. president. 
The consensus answer:  Require U.S. oil companies to provide ethanol fuel pumps 
at all their gas  stations, require U.S. auto companies to make all their new 
cars flex-fuel and  improve mileage standards, and get rid of the crazy 
54-cent tariff we’ve imposed  on imported sugar ethanol (to protect our farmers). 
And  then let the market work. 
Demand for ethanol would soar. This would push us faster  down the innovation 
curve, so we’d solve the cellulosic ethanol problem quicker,  and that would 
strengthen the democrats in our hemisphere and weaken the  petrocrats in the 
Middle East. If only we were  as smart as Brazil ...   


Cynthia N.  Vance
Strategics International Inc.
8245 SW 116 Terrace
Miami, Florida,  33156
305-378-1327; fax 305-378-9178
_http://members.aol.com/facilitationfla_ 
(http://members.aol.com/facilitationfla) 

Want  to build your own facilitation skills? 
Want to meet facilitators from around  the world and in your own backyard? 
Mark your calendar for the International  Assoc. of Facilitators Conference 
2007 
Portland, Oregon -- March 8-10, 2007.  See _www.iaf-world.org_ 
(http://www.iaf-world.org/) 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: /pipermail/dialogue_wedgeblade.net/attachments/20061027/4c5f2b14/attachment-0001.html