Quote:
Originally Posted by Finnster
@ Luc: What I meant is that if the US switched a lot of the gasoline usage to EtOH, it would overwhelm world EtOH supplies. From the figures I saw, the US and Brasil produce ~4B gallons of EtOH a yr each. The US consumes ~400M gallons of gas a day. IE, we would burn thru the world supply in less than a month.
From the US perspective, we spend a lot of (tax) money, and have a huge corn lobby, building and protecting a(n inferior) corn-based EtOH supply.
From Brasil's view, they've spend decades building pure EtOH based transportation and economy. If left unchecked, the US could piss thru a lot of it very quickly, forcing prices up. As Red pointed out, EtOH burning engines have to be specially designed, so it would not be easy or cheap for Brasil to switch to a petroleum fuel supply to replace the lost EtOH.
I'm not suprized Brasilian EtOH is much cleaner than US corn based EtOH as the starting material is so much cleaner (ie pure sucrose sugar.) Corn would have a lot more complex sugars and starches, as well as plant oils, chaff and other crap that would have to be processed, refined and distilled out.
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We make more than that Finnster. We make so much that we have a lot of surplus of it. It wouldn't hurt Brasil one bit if the US decided to mix more Ethanol into the gasoline. Brasil has plenty of petrol too, so we are good. More and more deposits are being found, but since Brasil doesn't consume as much as we do here in the US, we don't refine it. Cars built in Brasil are all flex fuel and since here it would be a higher mixture of gasoline, it would provide the protection the engine needs. I have a converter that allows any gas cars to run on E85. I used it in my VW Passat in Florida and ran well. I hope the US imports ethanol from Brasil, it would make my family happy
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