More Than a Vacation: Visiting an Ethanol Biorefinery in Brazil

by Amanda Ferreira (Advanced Biofuels USA) This past summer I had the opportunity to go to Brazil to visit some of my family whom I hadn’t seen for more than five years. A lot had changed since the last time I had visited and there was much I didn’t know about my family. For example, I didn’t know that my uncle, Walter Ventura Ferreira, Jr., was currently a manager for Raizen, an energy company that specializes in sugarcane ethanol. Once my dad told him that I was volunteering at a non-profit whose goal is to promote education about biofuels, he was thrilled to take us to the plant he manages at Jatai, Goais, Brazil.

To get to the production plant, we drove about 15 minutes outside of the city, Jatai, fields of sugarcane to our left and right. Once getting there, my uncle pointed out the houses across the street in which workers from the north of Brazil stay in order to work at the plant, which is in the south. We were fortunate enough to see a truck being received by the plant. Before unloading, the truck is weighed and a sample of the amount of sugar inside the sugarcane is taken. The truck is parked under a machine which lowers a tube and that tube takes the sample. In order to make the process safe, the truck driver leaves his truck and operates the machine himself. From there, the sugarcane is brought to where it will be crushed.
At this point in the trip, my uncle brought us to his office. The plant is the size of a small community; a number of workers were seen riding bicycles to get around their work place. His office is in the midst of the plant. There is a control room with about fifteen workers, all watching a different screens, seeing the production and controlling the sugarcane refinement process. One of the workers brought us through the process of the refinement. Unfortunately, I only picked up some of the technical language, although I understand Portuguese. I do know that the sugarcane is washed more than 16 times in high temperature waters. After the sugarcane is crushed, the left over sugarcane, called bagasse, is then burnt to create electricity for the plant and is also sold back to the government. Also, all parts of the sugarcane are recycled and reused; nothing is wasted. The high temperature water is also cooled down and reused.
At this particular plant, they produced electricity and ethanol. The entire plant functions using the energy they create and the extra energy produced is used in other parts of Brazil.
I traveled to many different places after visiting the ethanol refinery. Sadly, much of those trips were long car rides. What I noticed from these car rides were that many use ethanol rather than gasoline in their cars. These cars are mostly only manual cars. Ethanol is also exceedingly cheaper than gasoline, making it more economical to use, especially when traveling to far-away places.
From the ethanol refinery to daily life, I realized how prominent biofuels are in Brazil.

Amanda Ferreira, an International Baccalaureate program student at Urbana High School in Frederick County, Maryland, volunteered with Advanced Biofuels USA during the summer of 2013.