Biofuel Plant Opens in Brazil

You overlooked an obvious environmental problem. Have you done the simple back-of-the-envelope calculation, on how much land this technique consumes? I'll tell you: it would take three Amazon rainforests of land to meet present oil consumption (which is of course rapidly RISING as the developing world ascends). In short, it is completely unscalable and hence worthless as a practical, world-size energy resource.

In numbers: a typical yield figure for sugar-cane ethanol, according to A. da Rosa, "Fundamentals of Renewable Energy Processes, 2005" (via wikipedia), is 4,000 litres/hectare-year (for Americans, 430 gallons/acre per year. A hectare is (100 meters)^2 or 10,000 meters^2).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sugarcane#Cane_ethanol

2008 world crude oil production was 81.8 million barrels/day, or (an oil barrel being 159 L) 4.75 trillion litres per year.

http://www.bp.com/sectiongenericarticle.do?categoryId=9023770&contentId=7044467

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barrel_(volume)#Oil_barrel

Ethanol has 65% of the volumetric energy density of crude oil, 24 megajoules/litre vs. 37 MJ/L:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density#Energy_densities_ignoring_external_components

And the Amazon rainforest has a total area of 5.5 million km^2, or 550 million hectares:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_Rainforest

So, put together: the sugar ethanol potential of the entire Amazon, is 550 M ha * (4000 L/ha*year) = 2.2 trillion L/year of ethanol. This is the energy equivalent of 1.4 trillion L/year of crude oil, or under 1/3rd of current world production.

For those checking this, I recommend Google Calculator, if you haven't yet discovered it.

http://www.google.com.au/help/calculator.html

There is no way around it: growing sugar cane is an absurdly inefficient use of resources. There is no chance of replacing oil with Brazilian ethanol, and even a making a tiny contribution would have gigantic environmental effects, such as deforesting large parts of the Amazon (besides less newsworthy effects such as fertilizer runoff and algal blooms.)

Any serious candidate for replacing oil would need to be an exceedingly energy-dense resource, just like oil deposits are. The measly 0.3 W/m^2 of sugar cane ethanol isn't a candidate. Nuclear reactors are the best bet, creating synthetic fuels such as methanol or dimethyl ether (using atmospheric CO2 as a feedstock - analogous to biofuels, except with high-power industrial chemistry in place of photosynthesis), or hydrogen or its derivatives (ammonia or metal hydrides). A single 3 gigawatt reactor, with 50% efficient conversion of heat to fuel, would equal 5,000 km^2 of sugar cane plants. A thousand such reactors are equal to the whole Amazon rainforest converted into a fuel plantation. Three thousand would completely replace oil on earth.

I overlooked the fact that this company is creating hydrocarbon fuel, rather than ethanol. However, since their feedstock is the same (sugar, rather than the cellulosic parts), the energy yields should be comparable.

Sadly, the comment is factually challenged. The Amazon is simply not suitable climatically for sugarcane production. Secondly, soon as the cellulosic ethanol production technology matures, potential yields will be over 12,000 litres ethanol/ha. But since great strides are being made in eliciting the production of biobutanol and hydrocarbons, soon as the technologies are scaled commercially, ethanol will invariably be displaced as a fuel of choice for the reasons stated (e.g. low energy denisty).

Please have a look at this research concerning carbonyl emissions from biodiesel: http://politicalecology.xyvy.info/?p=1333
Thanks