Biofuels: the sweet smell of power

Last Updated: 12:01am BST 12/08/2008

Gabrielle Walker argues that Brazil's success with sugar cane points the way to a sustainable biofuels future
Now that oil prices have dipped to a seven-week low (of less than $120 a barrel), motorists might be tempted to breathe a sigh of relief. But this is likely to be little more than a lull.

A report published last Friday by the think tank Chatham House predicts that an impending oil supply crunch will drive the price up to $200. In other words, economics is now reinforcing what climate campaigners have been saying for years: petrol is just too expensive, both for the pocket and the planet.
But is there an alternative if we want to keep driving our cars? Last year's transport panacea - biofuel - has become this year's pariah. Fuels that were previously touted as green have been accused of producing almost as many emissions as they save and in the process driving the price of food so high that even First-World economies are starting to feel the inflationary heat.
And yet, not all biofuels are bad. To see how to get them right, you need to look across the Atlantic; not at America, but Brazil. After the 1970s oil price shock, Brazil decided to find a new way to travel. It has been using biofuels ever since, and the results are impressive.
In the petrol stations around Rio sleek diplomatic cars queue up with battered jalopies at the pumps marked "A" for "alcool". Ninety per cent of all new cars in Brazil use a flexible technology which means they can use either petrol or alcohol.
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Even the regular petrol pumps deliver a mix containing 25 per cent alcohol. And this year, for the first time, alcohol outsold petrol in Brazil's service stations.
But doesn't producing all that alcohol divert food crops, driving up prices? No, says Roberto Schaeffer, associate professor in the Energy Planning Programme at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The alcohol in Brazil's cars comes from the same source as the rum in its caipirinha cocktails: sugar cane.
This, says Schaeffer, is vastly more efficient than corn. Whereas one hectare (2.47 acres) produces three or four tons of corn, the same area will yield 100 tons of sugar cane. Thus, to provide Brazil's light vehicle fleet with half its energy takes barely 5 per cent of the country's available agricultural land, which he says is not nearly enough to affect food prices.
Then there's the issue of just how much carbon dioxide biofuels really save. Once again, corn is the villain of the story and sugar cane the hero. A report by the International Energy Agency last year found that biofuel based on corn typically produced emissions 15-25 per cent lower than petrol; sugar cane alcohol, on the other hand, reduced CO2 by up to 90 per cent.
Producing the alcohol costs the equivalent of $30 a barrel - a number that's now a distant dream for oil. By allowing pump prices to shadow petrol, producers enjoy a comfortable margin, but they leave just enough of a discount to give motorists an incentive to buy.
Alcohol isn't the only biofuel in the reckoning - there's also biodiesel. In principle, biodiesel can be made from most things that contain oil. In practice, much of the biodiesel flooding into the European Union comes from Indonesian palm plantations, for which massive areas of rainforest have been destroyed. EU leaders are now considering ways to ensure that sources of biodiesel are sustainable.
In Rio, Schaeffer and his team are experimenting with their own alternatives. In a lab next to his office sit neat, multi-coloured jars of oil labelled with their provenance. There's a deep red biodiesel from cooking oil, a straw-coloured one from white cow fat, and a beautiful rich golden oil that came from the undigested fat in sewage - perhaps the ultimate form of recycling.
Whatever the eventual sources of commercial biodiesel, Brazil's farsightedness has made it a world leader in technologies that everybody wants to adopt. Brazil's motorists consider biofuels to be an utterly normal fact of life. They provide a salutary lesson to the rest us, not only in how to get biofuels right, but also in just how painless switching to a low-carbon lifestyle can be.
• 'The Hot Topic: How to tackle climate change and still keep the lights on' by Gabrielle Walker and David King (Bloomsbury) is available from Telegraph Books for £9.99 + £1.25 p&p. Call 0870 428 4112 or go to books.telegraph.co.uk.