Brazil’s cars have run on ‘green fuel’ for a century, but not without costs
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Another issue (not mentioned by the text) is that long-term sugarcane farming desertifies the environment where it's grown. Yeah - it is not sustainable in the long run.
Whey, the by-product of dairy manufacturing, is most cheaply disposed of by feeding to pigs. The excess the pigs can't eat is supposed to be safely disposed of, but this is often deemed too costly, and it ends up in the river. A bribe to the right official will be cheaper anyway.
So I started to buy the stuff, for pennies per decalitre. Dairies didn't have to bribe officials anymore, and the river is spared. My refrigerated truck then brought this enormous amount of whey to my nanofiltration pump (setup with the help of a local chemical engineer), where we split it into Whey Protein Isolate, which is the powder bodybuilders drink. I then became a local supplier for the (at the time) only South American company that produced and marketed protein powders in Brazil, sold my share of the business, and came home a slightly wealthier man.
Every stage of this was a nightmare. The uses of whey have been well documented in the literature since the 1920's, and the equipment is cheap. In engineering terms, it's a completely solved problem. But the bureaucracy....
I'm not surprised, I completely expect it and do what I can to mitigate it. But it's still shocking. What kind of sociopath builds something and decides "I'll throw this leftover crap where others drink" for decades? And why do they have so much power, so frequently?
Whey is an example of ease of rationalization "you're just feeding the fish".
A business managed by a sociopath has a larger margin of profit, due to arseholery like: misleading customers, dumping stuff on rivers, bribing authorities, etc. That makes the business able to expand faster, more resilient to eventualities, and more attractive to vulture capital injecting money in it. Those sociopaths will also see no issue whatsoever on amassing power elsewhere, for the sake of their business.
As such, businesses playing by the rules are outcompeted by the ones managed by sociopaths. Darwin style.
Of course that might be a hard sell given the importance of the ethanol production industry in the economy.
But it might be a good strategy for countries that don't yet have the purchasing power to support a market for pure EVs.
However, ethanol is too expensive south of São Paulo, so it is hardly ever used.
Anyway, a flex/eletric hybrid would be very useful.
Just turn the solar radiation into electricity and turn that into power. Solar and EVs are here now.
cars that run on ethanol are also cheaper than EVs and are going to stay cheaper for a long time.
Reason why not many people buy new houses with lower TCO, they prefer to spend a bit more every month to heat/cool them, because they can squeeze the money out of their monthly budget, than spend 3x upfront.
Solar panels are also heavily subsidized almost everywhere.
I don’t know what the Brazil mortgage market is like, but having a mortgage that’s larger and a keeping your other bills much smaller should be a net win without spending more out of pocket.
Speaking of my country, if you ask for a mortgage you usually have to put at least 20% of the total upfront and the bank can deny it for lack of guarantees or it's too large for your pockets.
So on average people prefer to spend less than spend more and amortizing the difference in the future.
For that reason there's been a quite successful program of State incentives in .y country to install solar panels or increase energy efficiency of buildings so that it would cost people zero or close to zero to upgrade .
Otherwise people would have wait for the prices to drop a lot more than they are right now.
They aren’t cheap but that’s about what car companies are selling not the technology. People view 350 mile ranges as a luxury feature but they don’t require that much extra battery over a 250 mile range.
I suspect the battery manufacturing would also be far worse than the lifetime of alcohol for the environment, but that depends a lot on how each is made.
Meanwhile paying for 30 years of gas adds up, especially when fuel economy decreases with age.
I've seen this point come up a lot.
The energy used to recharge batteries right now is being mostly produced using traditional means of power production, mostly fossil.
So in the end we are only shifting costs, not really saving.
Another important point not being discussed is that used vehicles are dirty cheap (easily under 1k) and can still run with very little engine maintenance with the only cost being fuel.
With the energy crisis we are living, I'm not sure EV are going to cost so much less than ICE to operate.
If you need to change tires or get into an accident and the car needs repairs, it doesn't matter if it's an EV or an ICE,
You still have to pay for it and probably the EV cannot be repaired by a gas station mechanic.
The same gas station worker might lose business due to EVs becoming more popular and that's not gonna be cheap economically and socially.
Before it's gonna be cheaper, we need to completely overhaul the way transport economics works.
I don't have the slightest idea of how long it is gonna take, but it's not gonna be tomorrow.
Next out of global electricity production 16% is hydro, 10.3% nuclear, 5.3% is wind, and solar is 2.5%. And wind and solar numbers are rapidly trending upwards. The 23% from Natural gas is also vastly cleaner both from extremely efficient turbines and because of inherent advantages to the fuel.
It’s only the 36.7% that from coal where the numbers come close while still slightly favoring EV’s per mile.
The problem is, when you add that demand to your power grid, is that increasing the supply of hydro, nuclear, wind, or solar? In practice, the extra demand from EVs only increases the correlated amount of coal used as that is where the excess of potential electricity generation is, for now.
The US hasn’t built a large coal plant recently and none are currently planned. https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=30812
Looking at the number being decommissioned over the next few years it doesn’t seem like EV transition is really changing anything. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_coal-fired_power_stati...
ICE engines can easily be adapted to use it, the infrastructure for gas pumps is already in place, I do not own a car but when I need one I use my mother's car that runs on methane gas.
Of course EV fueled by 100% green energy is the future we all hope for, but I wouldn't discard the economic advantage, especially in less developed countries, of cheap cars that run on greener fuel.
There are also many countries like China or Germany that are heavily reliant on coal for energy production right now, because it makes it easier to adapt the output to the demand, maybe a more mixed approach instead of "EV or die" could lead to a faster transition curve toward less CO2 intensive vehicles and one that is economically more feasible on a global scale.
I also doubt Brazil will be full of Tesla anytime soon.
What's the average for sedans and how does it compare to the Tesla Model S long range?
I spend about as much on fuel for my elderly 20,000-mile-per-year Range Rover as half a monthly payment for a new EV, and because it's dual-fuel it's actually cleaner than an electric vehicle.
no need to assume I believe something because someone fooled me.
Electricity is not easy to transport at all.
It needs infrastructure that might not exist yet in some areas or would require massive investments.
If electricity was so easy to transport we would not buy gas from Russia, we would buy the electricity directly from them.
Simply put: transporting the fuel is easier and cheaper.
Storing it for time of need is also a no brainer.
Not because fossil fuel industry told me, but because it is what it is.
Brasil loses 16% of their power production during distribution.
Don't get me wrong, I love solar energy, I installed solar panels at my house and thanks to State incentives I paid zero of the 35k euros it would have costed, but unfortunately we are not there yet.
http://insideenergy.org/2015/11/06/lost-in-transmission-how-...
Transportation of electricity over thousands of kilometers and through oceans is very hard as well. Routine with natural gas.
Maybe best if you get the basics straight before jumping into the discussion.
Brazil uses sugar cane, which has better energy yield than corn for ethanol, due to it's higher caloric content. But yes, it is less efficient than direct solar to batteries.
> Just turn the solar radiation into electricity and turn that into power. Solar and EVs are here now.
Yes, but large battery vehicles are still to expensive in developing and middle income countries - they are just now getting affordable to the masses in developed countries.
A smaller battery could easily offset 50-80% of ethanol fueled miles because most daily drives are short, so a smaller affordable PHEV with a 20kWh battery could offset a lot of liquid fuel usage.
To make corn ethanol you get an energy loss actually, the energy usage to grow and process the corn, for example to power the tractors and so on, is bigger than the energy you can get burning it.
US government solution for this is spetacularly boneheaded too.
So USA has so much corn because it has corn subsidies. This is the reason for USA using the terrible for health corn syrup too instead of sugar from cane.
Then USA government decided to give ethanol subsidies to incentive green fuels.
Result is people make corn ethanol, get 2 subsidies, pollute a bit and cause a net energy loss.
So USA government decided solution was give a even bigger subsidy to sugar cane ethanol.
Result is Brazillians make sugar cane ethanol, sell to US companies, those companies collect the subsidy from it, buy corn ethanol that has 2 subsidies on that thus is extra cheap, sell back to Brazillians.
So now you have USA government giving 3 subsidies that result in people making a ton of corn ethanol, causing energy loss, and shipping it to Brazil, while Brazillians ship cane ethanol back, the shipping in question being done with Diesel ships.
Sometimes I wonder what the fuck is wrong with USA government to think that such decisions are good idea, wasting a ton of taxpayer money on energy losing production process and encouraging Diesel-based ocean shipping all in the name of "green".
It is not MY tax money though (I am Brazillian) so it is not like I can do anything about it.
A solar panel loses more than 70% of the power that hits it. But that doesn't disqualify it at all.
And plants lose a ridiculous percent of energy right at the photosynthesis stage, but they'd still beat solar panels if solar panel prices went back a few decades.
I'm focused on efficiency because that's one very important metric when we are talking about how to power the world. Ethanol is a scam.
It is. But solar panels used to be so expensive that photosynthesis was much cheaper, despite the differences.
> I'm focused on efficiency because that's one very important metric when we are talking about how to power the world.
But a factor of 3 is not very much when you look at the entire process. The costs can very so wildly, and the existing steps lose so much energy, that the particular number you're pointing to isn't a big deal.
> Ethanol is a scam.
Depends on how you make it, where you intend to use it, and how much you're willing to tax carbon emissions. If fossil fuels are $2 a liter, my best estimate is that cars will switch to batteries but airplanes will buy biofuel.
Makes me wonder if your comment is literal copypasta, or merely figurative copypasta from US ecoactivism.
It really does. Corn ethanol takes a unit of fossil fuel to produce 1.3 units of ethanol, while sugar cane produces 9 units of ethanol for the same single unit of fossil fuel. I'm not sure what happened to switchgrass, but it's reportedly twice as efficient at producing ethanol as sugar cane, 20:1.
Ethanol isn't a terrible idea, depending on its source (corn is bad, while sugar cane, sugar beets and switchgrass are good). The infrastructure is already in place, takes little cost or effort to convert a petrol vehicle to ethanol, and ethanol provides better performance in ICE vehicles than petroleum, though at the cost of slightly less milage. I think losing a little milage is a small price to pay for better performance, clean air, and no contribution to Climate Change.
The 2023 Chevy Bolt has a 247 mile range and a $27,000 MSRP without government incentives. That’s still a higher cost of ownership than a used ICE, but things are getting a lot closer. https://www.chevrolet.com/electric/bolt-ev-2023
A big advantage of EVs is that presidents of the future shouldn't need to beg for oil as much, as road transportation energy supply market would be largely domestic.
But we clearly aren't there yet.
> planes
Sustainable aviation fuel, synfuels
> trucks,
Hydrogen fuel cells
freight trains,
Batteries, renewable diesel, synfuels
> heating,
Heat pumps
> electricity production
Outside of some remote islands petroleum is hardly used for electricity production.
That’s widely incorrect. How exactly much batteries we need, what their chemistry should be is up for some debate as are exact numbers for commercially viable raw materials etc.
But using the numbers from here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth... and using the deepest mine * land area of earth gives enough lithium to build batteries to store roughly 200 years world of the total electricity generation of the entire planet.
Clearly we are never going to actually mine that much lithium, but just as clearly we don’t need anything like that much eitehr.
Strip mine the entire planet to a depth of multiple miles, and the resulting batteries are still few enough to talk about in human terms. This is not good.
In terms of clean energy, inflation adjusted US wholesale rates fell as we dramatically reduced the grids carbon footprint. 2022 is looking like a major anomaly, but that’s in part because natural gas prices are through the roof due to Russia’s invasion.
I don't see how that's relevant. The alternative for your house isn't powering it with gasoline.
> and government subsidies for the industry are never ending
You should expect that when it's still "around the corner".
And it could make sense to continue subsidizing EV purchases once prices are similar. Or even beyond that, if you want new-ish EVs to be competitive with a bigger chunk of used gas cars in upfront price.
And keep in mind that degradation is fastest at the beginning, so at 200000km, you have about 92% of what you started with, not the 88% you'd expect if it were linear.
It's less important than it looks like, but it's backed up by a rather nasty political mafia.
At least for SP/PR/SC/RS, a better approach is to simply forget that the Brazilian government exists, and implement measures to reduce fuel consumption. Such as building an actually usable trains infrastructure for goods transportation across cities, and investing further on public transportation for passengers inside large metropolises.
That's an important aspects too many tend to fail considering, for instance "hey, but we can made antarctic bases with food self-sufficiency", yes, we can, for a single base and very few humans inside. With the work of hundred, thousand of others and a tremendous effort: the fact something is doable and done and does work at a certain scale does not means it can work at every scale.
> Continued problems with vinasse-dumping marred the sugar-ethanol industry’s environmental image, even as specialists encouraged repurposing the nitrogen-heavy byproduct as a fertiliser. Today, compliance with anti-dumping legislation is still not effectively enforced.
"In the past, vinasse was a problem in production of ethanol, but vinasse is also a good fertilizer (at least for some time) and a source of methane that can be used to generate heat or electricity. Moreover, other uses of vinasse involving also the formulation of nutritive solutions for hydroponics, formulation of culture media for plant tissue culture and culture media for algal growth."
Seems like it's only a problem because it's being dumped and not being purchased for reuse.
They compete against plant agriculture for access to land, making food more expensive.
Often they also use a lot of energy, water and produce CO2 during the farming process.
Reminder: you should read the article before commenting, to not make a fool out of yourself.
Maize is not relevant in this discussion. RTA and you'll see why.
I don't think they capture as much co2 as they release.