[Dialogue] The Energy Harvest -- sending again.
FacilitationFla at aol.com
FacilitationFla at aol.com
Fri Oct 27 16:10:05 EST 2006
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/)
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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/)
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