Brazil's economy is on steroids right now thanks to abundant natural resources and high commodity prices. EWZ has been very good to me. How do you play this?: January 23 - Bloomberg (Carlos Caminada): "Brazil's Agriculture Minister Roberto Rodrigues said the country must invest $10 billion over the next six years to boost ethanol output in order to meet rising foreign demand for the fuel."
I read somewhere that 90% of Brazilian vehicles operate on ethanol. With the current high oil prices ethanol probably is more competitive with gasoline.
Don't forget about 20 cents a pound sugar. This has to effect the competitiveness of ethanol.(Ethanol making is a inefficient process to begin with)
Since 98 the long term average price (5years) of sugar had been going down before the recent spike up. For oil it had been going up. Today Oil is up ~400% from '98 price levels compared to sugar up ~200%. The recent runup in sugar may be a result of the realization that ethanol can be competitive with gasoline. I haven't researched this topic much, it's just an idea.
you are right on the money. Sugar is he new oil play. It will increase 4 or 5 fold from here where oil probably has another 2 or 2.5 fold increase. (long term)
Even Bush pushed ethanol in his SOTU: "We will also fund additional research in cutting-edge methods of producing ethanol, not just from corn but from wood chips, stalks, or switch grass. Our goal is to make this new kind of ethanol practical and competitive within six years. Breakthroughs on this and other new technologies will help us reach another great goal: to replace more than 75 percent of our oil imports from the Middle East by 2025." Of course, the 75% stat (where did he come up with that?) is utterly laughable, but if the U.S. makes any substantial move toward ethanol, it has to bode well for the likes of Brazil, which is swiftly converting the Amazon to cash crops.
The figure for ethanol in Brazil is about 80%. That figure takes into account that most of these autos can run both fuels. I was recently there for 4 months, and almost everyone was running gasoline. This was way up north though, may be vastly different in the rest of the country.
It took less than 24 hours for that to be euthanized. Was it Exxon's CEO who called, or was it Saudi Aramco's? What other parts of the SOTU were """misstatements"""? Posted on Wed, Feb. 01, 2006 Administration backs off Bush's vow to reduce Mideast oil imports By Kevin G. Hall Knight Ridder Newspapers WASHINGTON - One day after President Bush vowed to reduce America's dependence on Middle East oil by cutting imports from there 75 percent by 2025, his energy secretary and national economic adviser said Wednesday that the president didn't mean it literally. What the president meant, they said in a conference call with reporters, was that alternative fuels could displace an amount of oil imports equivalent to most of what America is expected to import from the Middle East in 2025. http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwas...38.htm?source=rss&channel=krwashington_nation
. February 2, 2006 SouthAmerica: Brazil has a very advanced automobile industry and as you can see in the enclosed column by Thomas Friedman â published on The New York Times on June 17, 2005. Brazil is away ahead of the game when compared with the United States and today a large number of cars in Brazil use flexible-fuel technology. Brazil hopes to have all its new cars flex-fuel ready by 2008. As Luft notes, if you combined a plug-in hybrid system with a flex-fuel system that burns 80 percent alcohol and 20 percent gasoline, you could end up stretching each gallon of gasoline up to 500 miles. By 2008 all cars produced in Brazil will have the new flex-fuel system. A number of mine relatives and friends in Brazil have been driving cars with the new technology - flex-fuel system, and they love it. Brazil has been developing these new technologies for a number of years - I guess eventually even the United States can catch up to these new state-of-the-art auto technologies. ******** "AS TOYOTA GOES ..." By Thomas L. Friedman The New York Times June 17, 2005 So I have a question: If I am rooting for General Motors to go bankrupt and be bought out by Toyota, does that make me a bad person? It is not that I want any autoworker to lose his or her job, but I certainly would not put on a black tie if the entire management team at G.M. got sacked and was replaced by executives from Toyota. Indeed, I think the only hope for G.M.'s autoworkers, and maybe even our country, is with Toyota. Because let's face it, as Toyota goes, so goes America. Having Toyota take over General Motors - which based its business strategy on building gas-guzzling cars, including the idiot Hummer, scoffing at hybrid technology and fighting Congressional efforts to impose higher mileage standards on U.S. automakers - would not only be in America's economic interest, it would also be in America's geopolitical interest. Because Toyota has pioneered the very hybrid engine technology that can help rescue not only our economy from its oil addiction (how about 500 miles per gallon of gasoline?), but also our foreign policy from dependence on Middle Eastern oil autocrats. Diffusing Toyota's hybrid technology is one of the keys to what I call "geo-green." Geo-greens seek to combine into a single political movement environmentalists who want to reduce fossil fuels that cause climate change, evangelicals who want to protect God's green earth and all his creations, and geo-strategists who want to reduce our dependence on crude oil because it fuels some of the worst regimes in the world. The Bush team has been M.I.A. on energy since 9/11. Indeed, the utter indifference of the Bush team to developing a geo-green strategy â which would also strengthen the dollar, reduce our trade deficit, make America the world leader in combating climate change and stimulate U.S. companies to take the lead in producing the green technologies that the world will desperately need as China and India industrialize - is so irresponsible that it takes your breath away. This is especially true when you realize that the solutions to our problems are already here. As Gal Luft, co-chairman of the Set America Free coalition, a bipartisan alliance of national security, labor, environmental and religious groups that believe reducing oil consumption is a national priority, points out: the majority of U.S. oil imports go to fueling the transport sector - primarily cars and trucks. Therefore, the key to reducing our dependence on foreign oil is powering our cars and trucks with less petroleum. There are two ways we can do that. One is electricity. We don't import electricity. We generate all of our needs with coal, hydropower, nuclear power and natural gas. Toyota's hybrid cars, like the Prius, run on both gasoline and electricity that is generated by braking and then stored in a small battery. But, says Luft, if you had a hybrid that you could plug in at night, the battery could store up 20 miles of driving per day. So your first 20 miles would be covered by the battery. The gasoline would only kick in after that. Since 50 percent of Americans do not drive more than 20 miles a day, the battery power would cover all their driving. Even if they drove more than that, combining the battery power and the gasoline could give them 100 miles per gallon of gasoline used, Luft notes. Right now Toyota does not sell plug-in hybrids. Some enthusiasts, though, are using kits to convert their hybrids to plug-ins, but that adds several thousand dollars - and you lose your Toyota warranty. Imagine, though, if the government encouraged, through tax policy and other incentives, every automaker to offer plug-in hybrids? We would quickly move down the innovation curve and end up with better and cheaper plug-ins for all. Then add to that flexible-fuel cars, which have a special chip and fuel line that enable them to burn alcohol (ethanol or methanol), gasoline or any mixture of the two. Some four million U.S. cars already come equipped this way, including from G.M. It costs only about $100 a car to make it flex-fuel ready. Brazil hopes to have all its new cars flex-fuel ready by 2008. As Luft notes, if you combined a plug-in hybrid system with a flex-fuel system that burns 80 percent alcohol and 20 percent gasoline, you could end up stretching each gallon of gasoline up to 500 miles. In short, we don't need to reinvent the wheel or wait for sci-fi hydrogen fuel cells. The technologies we need for a stronger, more energy independent America are already here. The only thing we have a shortage of now are leaders with the imagination and will to move the country onto a geo-green path. .