Brazilian-U.S. Partnership Aims to Bump Up Ethanol Use

Brazil and the U.S. hope their new partnership will increase ethanol use and production throughout Latin America.

The governments of Brazil and the United States met last week to discuss a new energy partnership aimed at stimulating ethanol use in Latin America, The Washington Post reported February 7. U.S. officials said the agreement would encourage the sharing of cellulosic and other ethanol technologies between the two countries. The United States also hopes increased biofuel production in Latin America will reduce the power of oil-rich and politically controversial Venezuela in the region.

“It’s clearly in our interests—Brazil’s and the United States’s—that we expand the global market for biofuels, particularly ethanol, and that it become a global commodity of sorts,” said U.S. undersecretary of state R. Nicholas Burns. “Energy has tended to distort the power of some of the states we find to be negative in the world—Venezuela, Iran—and so the more we can diversify our energy sources and depend less on oil, the better off we will be.”

Brazilian industry has the potential to benefit from the partnership as well. “Up to yesterday, we considered the U.S. corn growers our enemies, and they considered us their enemies,” said Eduardo Pereira de Carvalho, president of Brazil’s sugar cane growers union. Experts note that the new alliance may help to resolve a long-standing source of contention between the countries: the United States’ 54-cent-a-gallon tariff on most imported ethanol.

If the U.S. government is successful in encouraging more countries to use and produce ethanol, undersecretary Burns expects biofuel, like oil, to become more of an internationally tradable commodity. Brazil and the United States currently produce 70 percent of the world’s ethanol. Demand for the fuel is expected to spike in the wake of U.S. President George W. Bush’s recent call for a 20 percent reduction in U.S. gasoline consumption by 2017, which would leave some 35 billion gallons (132.5 billion liters) ripe for the alternative fuels market.

More Resources: Biofuels for Transportation: Global Potential and Implications for Sustainable Agriculture and Energy in the 21st Century

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