Only insofar as it is relevant to exposing political dichotomy. Do you have a cute little icon for that? Asking for a friend.
Is it impossible for you to share relevant topical data?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/brazils-ethanol-sector-once-thriving-is-being-buffeted-by-forces-both-man-made-natural/2014/01/01/9587b416-56d7-11e3-bdbf-097ab2a3dc2b_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.62bf24527e92By Juan Forero
January 1, 2014
ITUMBIARA, Brazil — This should be a golden era here on Brazil’s farming frontier, where some of the world’s biggest corporations have invested billions of dollars in land, equipment and mills to turn sugar cane into ethanol.
The allure for these giants is Brazil itself, where most cars are built to run on the biofuel. An even bigger, largely untapped market awaits in the United States, where environmental standards favor cane-based ethanol over corn ethanol. Then there is China, with its growing, formidable fleet of cars.
To get the fuel to consumers, crews are building an 800-mile system of pipelines and river barges designed to carry billions of liters from here in central Brazil to bustling ports on the Atlantic. That, at least, was the plan.
But oil — the fuel that ethanol was supposed to be slowly replacing — got in the way.
Cane producers here in Goias state, where plantations can extend 250,000 acres, still churn out ethanol. But the industry is being challenged by forces that could not have been foreseen a half-
decade ago, when this country was being hailed by its president as the Saudi Arabia of ethanol.
The hydraulic-fracturing, or fracking, boom in the American Midwest, which unlocked cheap gas and oil from tight shale formations, has swiftly reduced the need for ethanol in the United States. Brazil, too, made its own discoveries — huge oil deposits offshore, four miles deep and under a cap of salt called the pre-salt.
Then, in a policy decision that has had major implications for ethanol here, Brazil’s government slashed taxes on gasoline, making it cheaper than ethanol for motorists.
“The scenario that we had a half-decade ago is not what we have anymore,” said Mauricio Muruci, who analyzes the ethanol industry here. “We are not thinking about ethanol in our future. We are thinking about pre-salt oil and shale gas.”
