Sugar Nation: Workers stockpile sugar at a sugarcane mill in the Brazilian state of São Paulo. Brazil is the world’s largest producer and exporter of sugar. The country may play a key role in producing the next generation of biofuels. Credit: Noah Friedman-Rudovsky

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The four-lane Anhangüera Highway leads northwest from Brazil's financial capital, São Paulo, into some of the most productive agricultural land in the world. The view from a car window reveals plantations of hairy eucalyptus trees and cow pastures rife with termite mounds. Fields of sugarcane roll out of sight over the hilltops.

Turn right at kilometer 104.5 and you enter Techno Park, a tidy corporate research neighborhood that looks as if it has been torn out of suburban California. And in a way, it has. In a building not far from the entrance are rows of neatly organized workstations, shiny fermentation tanks, and clanking centrifuges. All this machinery is a near-exact replica of the equipment at a facility in Emeryville, CA. Even the coat racks are the same.