page_title: Ethanol fuel in Brazil
section_title: Economic and production indicators
hierarchical_section_title: Ethanol fuel in Brazil / Production / Economic and production indicators
caption_attribution_description: English: Graph created with public data from União da Indústria de Cana-de-açúcar/UNICA e Ministério da Agricultura, Pecuária e Abastecimento/MAPA. Available at UNICA's website Created with Excel and converted to PNG with Photoshop Elements
context_page_description: Brazil is the world's second largest producer of ethanol fuel. Brazil and the United States have led the industrial production of ethanol fuel for several years, together accounting for 85 percent of the world's production in 2017. Brazil produced 26.72 billion liters, representing 26.1 percent of the world's total ethanol used as fuel in 2017.
  Between 2006–2008, Brazil was considered to have the world's first "sustainable" biofuels economy and the biofuel industry leader, a policy model for other countries; and its sugarcane ethanol "the most successful alternative fuel to date." However, some authors consider that the successful Brazilian ethanol model is sustainable only in Brazil due to its advanced agri-industrial technology and its enormous amount of arable land available; while according to other authors it is a solution only for some countries in the tropical zone of Latin America, the Caribbean, and Africa.
  In recent years however, later-generation biofuels have sprung up which don't use food crops that are explicitly grown for fuel production.
context_section_description: Ethanol production in Brazil uses sugarcane as feedstock and relies on first-generation technologies based on the use of the sucrose content of sugarcane. Ethanol yield has grown 3.77% per year since 1975 and productivity gains have been based on improvements in the agricultural and industrial phases of the production process. Further improvements on best practices are expected to allow in the short to mid-term an average ethanol productivity of 9,000 liters per hectare.
  There were 378 ethanol plants operating in Brazil by July 2008, 126 dedicated to ethanol production and 252 producing both sugar and ethanol. There are 15 additional plants dedicated exclusively to sugar production. These plants have an installed capacity of crushing 538 million metric tons of sugarcane per year, and there are 25 plants under construction expected to be on line by 2009 that will add an additional capacity of crushing 50 million tons of sugarcane per year. The typical plant costs approximately US$150 million and requires a nearby sugarcane plantation of 30,000 hectares.
  Ethanol production is concentrated in the Central and Southeast regions of the country, led by São Paulo state, with around 60% of the country's total ethanol production, followed by Paraná (8%), Minas Gerais (8%) and Goiás (5%). These two regions have been responsible for 90% of Brazil's ethanol production since 2005 and the harvest season goes from April to November. The Northeast Region is responsible for the remaining 10% of ethanol production, led by Alagoas with 2% of total production. The harvest season in the North-Northeast region goes from September to March, and the average productivity in this region is lower than the South-Central region. Due to the difference in the two main harvest seasons, Brazilian statistics for sugar and ethanol production are commonly reported on a harvest two-year basis rather than on a calendar year.
  For the 2008/09 harvest it is expected that about 44% of the sugarcane will be used for sugar, 1% for alcoholic beverages, and 55% for ethanol production. An estimate of between 24.9 billion litres (6.58 billion U.S. liquid gallons) to 27.1 billion litres (7.16 billion gallons) of ethanol are expected to be produced in 2008/09 harvest year, with most of the production being destined for the internal market, and only 4.2 billion liters (1.1 billion gallons) for exports, with an estimated 2.5 billion liters (660 million gallons) destined for the US market. Sugarcane cultivated area grew from 7 million to 7.8 million hectares of land from 2007 to 2008, mainly using abandoned pasture lands. In 2008 Brazil has 276 million hectares of arable land, 72% use for pasture, 16.9% for grain crops, and 2.8% for sugarcane, meaning that ethanol is just requiring approximately 1.5% of all arable land available in the country.
  As sugar and ethanol share the same feedstock and their industrial processing is fully integrated, formal employment statistics are usually presented together. In 2000 there were 642,848 workers employed by these industries, and as ethanol production expanded, by 2005 there were 982,604 workers employed in the sugarcane cultivation and industrialization, including 414,668 workers in the sugarcane fields, 439,573 workers in the sugar mills, and 128,363 workers in the ethanol distilleries. While employment in the ethanol distilleries grew 88.4% from 2000 to 2005, employment in the sugar fields just grew 16.2% as a direct result of expansion of mechanical harvest instead manual harvesting, which avoids burning the sugarcane fields before manual cutting and also increases productivity. The states with the most employment in 2005 were São Paulo (39.2%), Pernambuco (15%), Alagoas (14.1%), Paraná (7%), and Minas Gerais (5.6%).
caption: Production by harvest year 1990/91 to 2007/08.[87] Green is hydrated ethanol (E100) and yellow is anhydrous ethanol use for gasohol blending.
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