Sweet Fuel: How Sugar Came to Power Brazil’s Vehicles, with Jennifer Eaglin

Notable Quotes

• Ethanol in the Brazilian transportation sector: “The Brazilian government had also been subsidizing and funding research to develop a domestically-fueled ethanol engine that ran exclusively on ethanol … and they developed this engine that can run exclusively on ethanol. They launched commercial vehicles in the national market in 1979. By 1985, over 95 percent of all new cars on the road ran exclusively on ethanol. To accommodate this increased demand, by 1985 they were producing over 10 billion liters of ethanol per year.” (13:11)
• Environmental costs of ethanol: “For most of the industry’s history, as they produced this byproduct [called vinasse], they dumped it in the waters around the sugar-producing plants … This caused algae blooms that … led to all of these public health issues, particularly the deterioration of drinking-water quality, expansion of malaria, and other insect-spreading diseases. These came along with the expansion ... and the expanded consumption of ethanol that are often somewhat disaggregated from discussions of the air-quality benefits that came along with it.” (18:09)
• Considering environmental costs in the energy transition: “Alternative energies have environmental costs. We like to think that if we can transition away from petroleum-based fuels, we’ve solved the problem. When we talk about this big picture of, ‘Here are the good things that came along with the ethanol industry in Brazil, but here are some of the other problems that were also part of this industry’s development,’ it highlights that alternative energies are not a single catchall solution, but rather part of what we hope is a more dynamic and diverse solution to our energy crises.” (23:21)

Top of the Stack

• Sweet Fuel: A Political and Environmental History of Brazilian Ethanol by Jennifer Eaglin
• The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River by Richard White
• Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water by Mark Reisner
• Before the Flood: Destruction, Community, and Survival in the Drowned Towns of the Quabbin by Elisabeth C. Rosenberg
• Dammed Indians by Michael L. Lawson

The Full Transcript

Daniel Raimi: Hello and welcome to Resources Radio, a weekly podcast from Resources for the Future. I'm your host, Daniel Raimi.

Today we speak with Dr. Jennifer Eaglin, associate professor of history and core faculty member at the Sustainability Institute at the Ohio State University. Jennifer is the author of Sweet Fuel: A Political and Environmental History of Brazilian Ethanol, which documents the history and assesses the benefits and costs of the use of sugar-based ethanol in Brazil's vehicle fleet. It's a fascinating story and one that highlights the complexity of this alternative fuel source. Jennifer will help us understand how the industry came to prominence, how it has improved air quality, and how it has damaged water quality, ecosystems, and communities in parts of Brazil. Stay with us.

All right, Jennifer Eaglin from the Ohio State University, welcome to Resources Radio.

Jennifer Eaglin: Thanks for having me.

Daniel Raimi: Jennifer, we're going to talk today about the ethanol industry in Brazil, which is a fascinating topic. I'm looking forward to it, but first we always ask our guests how they got interested in working on environmental issues or energy issues. Did your interest in these topics develop as a kid or later in life?

Jennifer Eaglin: A little bit of both. I'm originally from Michigan. As the car-producing state in the United States, I certainly think that car and energy questions were circulating around me as I was growing up, but I particularly got into questions of ethanol when I was working on my master's degree in international affairs and international economics.

I took a course on international trade and development and ended up doing this random project on corn-based ethanol production in the United States and its impact on corn-producing farmers in Mexico, as states like Iowa became net importers of corn to accommodate the growing demand for ethanol in the United States. It was a fascinating project. My professor said, "If you're interested in ethanol, you should also look at Brazil.” Brazil is the other largest producer of ethanol in the world. They produce ethanol from sugarcane, while we produce ethanol from corn in the United States.

I ended up redirecting a lot of my interest towards that. I won a fellowship to study Brazilian ethanol policy. During that year, as I learned more about the industry, I realized there was this long history of ethanol production and consumption in Brazil that was very different from the American example. That led me to pursue my PhD in Latin American history and to write my dissertation on the history of the ethanol industry in Brazil.

Daniel Raimi: You dropped another fascinating nugget in there. Is it true that Iowa is a net importer of corn?

Jennifer Eaglin: It became a net importer of corn during the peak years of a lot of the early corn ethanol incentives in the late 2000s and early 2010s. I’m not sure if they remain a net importer, but it was fascinating. They actually redirected some of the corn that they were importing towards cereal production because a lot of the corn that was already being produced in Iowa was being redirected toward ethanol production. It was a fascinating project, and there's so much more to learn on that front as well.

Daniel Raimi: It's a podcast for another day. Let's talk now about Brazil. We're going to talk about the Brazilian ethanol industry, but I think it would also be helpful for us to know about Brazil's sugar industry. Can you give us a bit of history on how the sugar industry evolved in Brazil, how big it is, how it contributes to the country's economy, and any other relevant foundational points you want us to know?

Jennifer Eaglin: Brazil and the United States have the two largest producers of ethanol in the world, but Brazil's sugar-based ethanol industry is connected to this large and long history of sugar production in the country. Certainly Brazil has been a major sugar producer since its colonial inception, but today sugar is one of Brazil's largest agro-industries (an agricultural product that has industrial-size production). Brazil is the world's largest sugar producer, and it's also the largest sugar exporter in the world. India is often a close second and sometimes surpasses Brazil; the last time that India surpassed Brazil in production was around 2020.

They can go back and forth, but Brazil is always up there at the top. It's certainly the largest exporter of sugar-based ethanol. Brazil's economy is very dependent on large industrial exports. Most notably, its largest export is soy, and then sugar is the fourth-largest export in the Brazilian economy. Beef is currently right behind sugar as the fifth-largest export. These are illustrations of how important these agricultural products are in Brazil's overall economy—and then also how important sugar is as an ethanol producer in its energy economy.

Daniel Raimi: Let's move to that topic now and talk specifically about the sugar-based ethanol industry in Brazil. How did it get its start?

Jennifer Eaglin: Sugar and Brazil have long been linked. Brazil was the largest sugar producer for centuries—in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the largest sugar producer in the world. But by the early twentieth century, Brazil's major agricultural export and leading economic driver was coffee exports. Sugar had fallen out of international competition, particularly as countries within the Caribbean increased international competition and sugar exports.

As the sugar industry was struggling, these major, influential landowners and sugar producers increasingly looked to the government for economic support, particularly with the onset of the Great Depression, when international agricultural markets and export markets dried up. As they dried up, sugar producers started looking to the government and said, "We need some kind of help. We are overproducing sugar. We can't compete on the international market."

Ethanol—ethyl alcohol is the technical term—can actually be distilled from any agricultural starchy product, be it corn in the United States or sugar in Brazil. In Germany, they've produced ethanol from potatoes; in France from grapes. The technology to produce ethanol and to use ethanol as a fuel has been around as long as the internal combustion engine. Henry Ford and Thomas Edison were early supporters of using ethanol as a fuel option.

For a country like Brazil, which did not find large oil reserves until the twenty-first century, as oil became an increasingly important part of economic growth and development in the early- to mid-twentieth century. Then, investing in ethanol as a fuel alternative to petroleum became increasingly appealing. Brazil was not the only country to do that. Both Germany and France did not have very large oil reserves and also invested in ethanol development in the early twentieth century.

In the case of Brazil, state-led research proved that you could basically mix ethanol up to 20 or 25 percent with petroleum-based gasoline without having to make adaptations to traditional petroleum-fueled engines in cars. This became the foundation for the government to then implement a five percent–mandated mixture of ethanol in the national fuel supply in the 1930s in response to demands by the sugar producers that were looking for government support for the overproduction of sugar that they were struggling with in this timeframe. In the 1930s, you see this mixing of sugar and ethanol policy, where the creation of the ethanol industry was to help support the sugar industry.

Daniel Raimi: Let's jump ahead a few decades to another important policy moment in 1975, the year in which Brazil enacted the National Ethanol Program. Can you tell us about the National Ethanol Program and how it led to even further integration of ethanol into Brazil's transportation system?

Jennifer Eaglin: The five percent mixture of ethanol in the national fuel supply remains in place until the 1970s when the international oil prices are going to dramatically increase with what is generally known as the oil shocks or the oil embargo. Middle Eastern politics lead to the quadrupling of international oil prices by the beginning of 1974. For a country like Brazil, which still relied on foreign oil heavily for their energy needs—over 75 percent of all of their oil consumption was from oil imports—this has a huge economic impact or potential economic impact on their budget.

In response, a dictatorship was set up in 1964 and the military government in place at the time began or implemented this National Ethanol Program called Proálcool, or the Programa Nacional do Álcool, which is “the National Ethanol Program” in Portuguese. They implemented this program in 1975, and the initial goal was to expand the ethanol mixture from the 5 percent–mandated mixture to a 20 percent–mandated mixture in the national fuel supply. They put together a bevy of incentives and subsidies to help push this expansion of ethanol production.

They put incentives on the production of sugar, on subsidizing the price of ethanol, subsidizing incentives for new distilleries—subsidies for every step of this production chain. This successfully expands production: right before the beginning of the program, they were producing about half a billion liters of ethanol per year; by 1979, they were producing three billion liters of ethanol per year.

At the same time in 1979, you have another oil shock. Oil prices double again. In this timeframe, the Brazilian government had also been subsidizing and funding research to develop a domestically-fueled ethanol engine that ran exclusively on ethanol. They make adaptations—you had to make adaptations if you're going to mix ethanol above the 25 percent threshold—and they developed this engine that can run exclusively on ethanol. They launched commercial vehicles in the national market in 1979. By 1985, over 95 percent of all new cars on the road ran exclusively on ethanol. To accommodate this increased demand, by 1985 they were producing over 10 billion liters of ethanol per year.

Daniel Raimi: Wow! That’s rapid growth in demand for that product.

Let's talk now about some of the consequences of that ramp-up in demand. I imagine many of our listeners are wondering about what the domestic environmental consequences were for growing so much ethanol and using it for transportation. Can you tell us about how that ethanol used and produced in Brazil compares with petroleum-based fuels like gasoline in terms of greenhouse gas emissions over their life cycle?

Jennifer Eaglin: In the 1980s, when ethanol cars began to dominate the roads in Brazil, researchers in Brazil began studying the impacts of ethanol-fuel cars on the road on air quality. They found that ethanol cars released 65 percent less carbon monoxide, almost 70 percent less hydrocarbons, and about 13 percent less nitrogen oxide than gasoline-fueled cars. This became the foundation of increased government promotion and industry promotion of ethanol as a green fuel and as this environmentally beneficial option.

In the broader life-cycle footprint of ethanol compared to petroleum-based fuels, Brazilian ethanol is about five times more efficient than corn-based ethanol. It burns faster than gasoline. If you were driving an ethanol-fueled car, you're going to have to fill up your car more often than a gasoline-fueled car. But even with that fact, the overall estimates say sugar ethanol has about 40–60 percent less greenhouse gas emissions than petroleum. These things bode well, but they aren't the only environmental costs that come along with producing ethanol. This is a lot of what my book explores.

In addition to these benefits of lower greenhouse gas emissions, what came with this rapid expansion of sugarcane to rapidly expand ethanol production was massive land change and deforestation. The main region that I was studying that produced the largest amount of sugar and ethanol in the Proálcool era also accounted for the largest amount of primary deforestation of a forest region—not the Amazon that we're all familiar with, but in the south in the Atlantic Forest—in the timeframe between 1964 and 1985.

This massive expansion of sugar production also pushed the production of other agricultural goods into other areas, which accounts for increased land change costs. In addition to that, something that's often addressed very little is the water pollution that came along with massive ethanol production. In the distillation of ethanol, in the process you are also going to produce a byproduct called vinasse. It's this liquid, acidic, super smelly, almost sludge-like product that's about 90 percent water and seven or eight percent organic materials like potassium, calcium, nitrogen, and phosphorus.

For most of the industry's history, as they produced this byproduct, they dumped it in the waters around the sugar-producing plants. As we are increasingly familiar with when you dump large amounts of organic material in waterways, this caused algae blooms that sucked up all of the oxygen and led to all of these public health issues, particularly the deterioration of drinking-water quality, expansion of malaria, and other insect-spreading diseases. These came along with the expansion of ethanol and the expanded consumption of ethanol that are often somewhat disaggregated from discussions of the air-quality benefits that came along with it.

Daniel Raimi: It makes me think of an analogy with the United States, where corn production is heavily subsidized. That leads to expansion of farmland to grow crops. Those crops are fertilized, and the fertilizer runs off into rivers, and with so much organic material, the rivers’ water quality deteriorates and has significant impacts for ecosystems and potentially for public health, as well.

You were talking about refining the ethanol. I wonder if you saw some of those same effects that we experienced here in the United States around the actual cropland itself.

Jennifer Eaglin: One of the interesting things is that because this byproduct vinasse has all of these organic materials in it, they created what were called “lakes of sacrifice.” They would put all of this product into these pits. You had public outrage around deteriorating water quality, the smell, and all of these other problems.

Researchers at an agricultural institute in Sao Paulo eventually found that you could repurpose vinasse—dehydrate it and use it as a fertilizer alternative. This is part of a remarketing of vinasse as not necessarily this product of mass destruction, but rather as a potential benefit for agricultural production.

The problem became getting people to actually comply with it. Vinasse is expensive to store. It's expensive to repurpose. Increased government oversight has improved the environmental footprint of the industry and of sugar production in general, but it's certainly something that has to be monitored for compliance.

Daniel Raimi: That's a good segue to the last question I wanted to ask you before we go to our Top of the Stack segment, which is about lessons from Brazil that other countries can take going forward. As you probably know, if you look at scenarios of deep decarbonization in the future, most of them involve increased use—and some of them involve dramatically increased use—of biofuels and bioenergy often paired with carbon capture and sometimes not. These scenarios are very controversial.

There are a lot of arguments about the use of biofuels and bioenergy, in part because of the environmental consequences that we've been talking about today. What are some of the lessons that Brazil offers for other countries as they think about whether to expand their use of biofuels and bioenergy, and to what extent?

Jennifer Eaglin: I return to two main lessons.

One, that Brazil was able to integrate ethanol into its energy infrastructure and, in the 1980s, rapidly transform their transportation fuel usage toward ethanol is an inspiration, and it's a reminder that energy transitions are possible. That's one of the key things that I like to take away from the Brazilian example. But it's also worth noting that, by the 1990s, a lot of these environmental issues—including drought—actually imperiled the ability to produce enough ethanol to supply users. Users then transitioned back to gasoline-fueled cars and have since switched to flex-fueled vehicles that dominate the Brazilian roads today.

I would like to say that energy transitions are possible, but the other thing I take away from the Brazilian example is that alternative energies have environmental costs. We like to think that if we can transition away from petroleum-based fuels, we've solved the problem. When we talk about this big picture of, “Here are the good things that came along with the ethanol industry in Brazil, but here are some of the other problems that were also part of this industry's development,” it highlights that alternative energies are not a single catchall solution, but rather part of what we hope is a more dynamic and diverse solution to our energy crises.

Daniel Raimi: That's such a great point, and it's so relevant for all types of energy sources. Whether we're talking about solar and wind or nuclear, the environmental consequences of the life cycle of those technologies are in many ways far superior and preferential to oil and gas or coal, but it doesn't mean that they are without impacts or do not warrant scrutiny.

Jennifer, it's been a fascinating discussion. I've learned a ton, as I'm sure our listeners have. Now I'd like to ask you the same question we ask all of our guests at the end of each episode, which is to recommend something that's on the top of your literal or metaphorical reading stack. It can be something you read, watched, or heard—anything that you think is cool and that you think our listeners would enjoy.

Jennifer Eaglin: I love this question. I have a couple of things on the top of the stack, as any good historian probably is reading many books at once. My new research focuses on nuclear energy development and water policy in Brazil; I've been reading some classics around those issues that your listeners might also be interested in. Richard White's Organic Machine is about the Columbia River, hydroelectricity, water, and nuclear energy in the West. And then Marc Reisner's Cadillac Desert also is about water policy and development in the American West. They were written in the '80s, but I come back to them regularly, and they're incredibly insightful for the issues that we're facing today.

For those of us interested in Brazil, I'm currently reading Before the Flood, which talks about the Itaipu Dam in Brazil, which was until very recently the largest dam in the world until the Three Gorges Dam came online in China. I'm reading about the social and political impact of the building of the Itaipu Dam, which fits into these same themes of alternative energies and large-scale infrastructure building. Those are my suggestions.

Daniel Raimi: That's great. I'm actually going to build on your recommendations with one of my own because it's so relevant, and it is also literally at the top of my stack. It's a book that I'm about halfway through called Dammed Indians. It's a history of the Pick-Sloan Plan in the United States, which was developed by the Army Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation to build a series of dams on the Missouri River and its tributaries.

The book is all about how the construction of those dams affected Native American tribes that lived along the river. It displaced thousands of Native Americans, flooded much of their best cropland, and had destructive consequences for numerous tribes. This happened in the '50s and '60s and '70s here in the United States. I imagine there's some overlap with the books you're reading as well.

Jennifer Eaglin: I'll have to check it out.

Daniel Raimi: Yes, and you'll have to get it out of the library. I tried to get it on Amazon and it was like $2,000. It's one of those old academic books that's out of print and you can only find at old dusty libraries.

Jennifer Eaglin: Those are the good ones, right? Those are the good ones.

Daniel Raimi: Well, Jennifer Eaglin from the Ohio State University, thank you so much for coming on to Resources Radio today. It's been a fascinating discussion.

Jennifer Eaglin: Thank you so much.

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