ENVIRONMENT-BRAZIL: Clean Fuel Development Already Underway

By Mario Osava Reprint | | Print |

Mario Osava

RIO DE JANEIRO, Mar 7 2001 (IPS) - The challenge of finding an environmentally healthy and economically viable fuel is almost an obsession among experts in Brazil. In addition to sugarcane alcohol, which has been used in cars here since the 1970s, hydrogen, methane, vegetable oils and various combinations are being tested, or can already be found in vehicle fuel tanks.

The most important project under development involves hydrogen, a “clean” fuel that has for over a century been considered the energy source of the future. Its time has come, because it is increasingly needed as the planet suffers the consequences of emissions from petroleum-derived fuels.

Appropriate technology exists for using hydrogen as a fuel for cars, at a cost greater than diesel but less than the electricity used by a trolley, according to studies conducted between 1997 and 2000, says Marcio Schettino, superintendent of development for Sao Paulo’s Metropolitan Urban Transport Enterprise (EMTU).

In a second phase, to begin in the coming months, the technology will be tested for commercial use. Eight city buses fuelled by hydrogen will circulate throughout Sao Paulo for four years, until travelling a combined total of one million km.

The number of vehicles involved in the test could later expand to 100 or 200, if the system proves efficient. That is, if the technology created in the laboratory can function on the street and confirms the predicted costs.

The Ministry of Mining and Energy project being conducted by EMTU is one of the most advanced in the world, Schettino told IPS. It receives funding from the Brazilian government and the Global Environment Facility (GEF), and technical assistance from the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).

The new bus is electric, but obtains energy from fuel cells, a generator installed in the vehicle that transforms hydrogen into electricity.

The greatest challenge is producing hydrogen, which is not found in nature in its free state. It must be obtained from water through a process of electrolysis, which itself consumes a great deal of energy and complicates the economic and environmental viability of the project.

The Brazilian experts propose conducting the electrolysis process in the early mornings when energy consumption and prices are at their lowest.

It would mean stockpiling energy at night for use during the day. Brazil has the advantage of consuming energy largely produced by hydroelectric dams, a renewable and less polluting source than petroleum.

The fuel cells are to be imported from the few countries that manufacture them, including the United States and Canada.

Brazil is the world’s leading manufacturer of buses. Officials intend that the country will be the first to use hydrogen- propelled buses, which will be circulating by the end of this year, Schettino said.

Hydrogen will be at a competitive price by 2007, and within 20 years will be used by 25 percent of all cars, predicts the specialist.

It will first be used for public transport, but will later be used by cars – a dynamic that will benefit from the economy of scale, reducing costs, Schettino explained.

Fluctuations in petroleum prices could modify his predictions, however, given that if prices plummet – as they did in 1998 – it would be a disincentive for developing alternative energy.

Hydrogen not only can be produced from water, but also from natural gas and ethane – and at a lower cost. Such production would not prevent the emission of greenhouse gases, however, but would reduce them in comparison to the effects of petroleum- derived energy.

Curitiba, capital of the southern state of Paraná, is seeking immediate alternatives to improve the urban environment. Since December, 30 buses propelled by “ecological diesel” have been circulating in this city of 1.3 million people.

This special fuel is a mixture of traditional diesel with 11.2 percent anhydrous alcohol and 2.6 percent of an additive called AEP-102, derived from soy.

Previous tests with two buses, which travelled some 100,000 km using this mixture, emitted 43 percent less particulate mass than vehicles fuelled by conventional diesel, reports Elcio Luiz Karaz, head of Curitiba Urbanization, the firm in charge of city transport.

The goal is to gradually expand the use of the mixture to 2,600 passenger buses in Curitiba, he told IPS.

Its utilisation has extended to Cuiabá, a city of 60,000 and capital of Mato Grosso state in the west. The experience there is favoured by two factors: Cuiabá is home to the firm that produces the AEP-102 additive and the cane alcohol producers in the surrounding areas are also the owners of the city buses.

But “ecological diesel” damages the electronic fuel injection system in the vehicles, admits Karaz. In addition, it only reduces carbon dioxide emissions by 0.7 percent, the gas scientists agree is most responsible for the greenhouse effect.

In Rio de Janeiro, nearly all taxis use methane gas, a more economical fuel than gasoline. But the environmental advantages of it are lost because the improper adaptation of the vehicle for methane gas renders the electronic control of the engine useless, which is itself a mechanism intended to reduce gas emissions, explained Manuel Paulo de Toledo, head of the Sao Paulo State Company of Environmental Technology.

Some 250 buses use methane in Sao Paulo, a metropolis of 10 million that suffers high levels of air pollution. There are automobiles manufactured especially to use this gas, but their additional cost is double that of adapting a car at a mechanic’s shop that uses inexpensive and anti-environmental parts, Toledo complained.

Sugarcane alcohol, meanwhile, by the 1980s had become the fuel of more than 90 percent of the cars manufactured in Brazil. But the program, initiated following the oil crisis of 1973, is in danger of disappearing because the subsidies that maintain it are drying up and because of unstable fuel supplies and, as a result, unstable prices.

When sugar prices rise, the companies in the industry abandon fuel production because the raw material, the sugarcane itself, is the common denominator of both products.

But the fuel alcohol program could be reactivated and return to the level of the 1980s, driven by the need to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, which are causing global warming, commented Suzana Kahn Ribeiro, researcher at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.

Cane alcohol releases some greenhouse gases, but the sugarcane fields also absorb them. The fuel production could therefore be financed by the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) of the Kyoto Protocol (1997), under the Framework Convention on Climate Change, according to a project co-authored by Kahn Ribeiro.

Though it has not yet been finalized, the CDM is a channel through which an industrialised country can meet its emissions- reduction targets by financing a “clean” project in the developing South.