Gazzoni, a member of the technical team that drew up the National Agro-Energy Plan, launched by the Ministry of Agriculture in 2003, and also a member of the International Science Panel on Renewable Energies, which makes up part, among other entities, of the International Council for Science (ICSU), believes that the development of biodiesel in Brazil is still in its embryonic phase. “On a world scale as well. The current stage of biodiesel is comparable to that of alcohol in the decade of the 1980s. There’s still a lot of water to pass under the bridge from the technological point of view, and Brazil, yet again, has advantages when compared to other countries.” For him, among those advantages in relation to this biofuel is principally the strong liaison between the sources of scientific knowledge. “We need to make the difference now because we were going down the wrong path, contrary to ethanol. We weren’t capable of perceiving in the past the importance of biodiesel.”

Gazzoni’s argument is made principally in the elaboration of growing crops in order to produce vegetable oil. “We need to make more productive growing areas with, for example, the dendê (palm), castor bean, canola, sun flower and even the soya bean, but this takes longer. The main point is to look for greater energetic density in crops before destined to human food or animal feed.” Gazzoni believes that, at the current stage of these crops, only the dendê oil production of more than 3,000 liters per hectare (l/ha), and which could even reach 4,000, is sustainable in 20 years’ time. Nothing comparable, as yet, with the old and good sugarcane, a gramineous plant, today capable of producing, at the minimum, some 8,000 l/ha.

During a lecture at USP’s Advanced Studies Institute in March, Gazzoni pointed out that the world produced 6.2 million tons of biodiesel in 2006 and should need in 2011 a production of 33.5 million and in 2020 some 133.8 million. The growing production is coming mainly from Europe where the percentage of biodiesel added to normal diesel will be 5.75% by 2010. Production on the continent reached 3.84 million tons in 2006, previously 6.06 million in 2005, having Germany in the lead during these two years. There, the main oil used comes from canola, previously a European export product, now confined to the continent for addition to the fuel of buses, trucks and cars, which also, to a large extent, are driven on diesel. In Europe, biodiesel has been produced industrially since 1992 and its use is relevant at this moment above all because of the need to decrease pollutant gases such as carbon dioxide (CO2). Various studies indicate that the use of 1 kilo of biodiesel reduces by around 3 kilos the quantity of CO2 in the atmosphere. The pollution emissions from biodiesel are between 66% to 90% in relation to conventional diesel.

The reality of biodiesel produced today in Brazil basically comes from the soya bean, where the offer and price seduce the producers, as well as the residue after the oil production, the so-called soya cake, which has a good market in animal feed as a protein source. It so happens that soya has physical properties that are not very appropriate or productive for biodiesel. Its seeds yield only 18% of oil, resulting in a production of 700 l/ha. The castor bean, with 47% of oil reaches 1,200 l/ha, and the sun flower, with 40%, 800 l/ha. According to Ricardo Dornelles, director of the Renewable Fuel Department of the Ministry of Mines and Energy, soya is the raw material for 55% of the national biodiesel produced up until now. “The castor bean represents 20% and the remainder is divided among other oleaginous crops such as the dendê and forage turnip.” For him there is still a long way to go in research, both in the process of ethanol use, which requires improving in order to contribute with industrial costs, and in the development of crops that show greater oil productivity and pest control. “The soya crop has an advantage because the oil production process is well developed and totally dominated by the agro-industry”, says Dornelles. “We think that it’s also necessary to program and to carry out the zoning of crops in such a way that they become more productive in determined regions.”

The castor bean, for example, occupies second place principally through the incentives to the producers in the Northeast region. The social seal established by the National Biodiesel Program is given to production that comes from initiatives considered as family agriculture and zeroes the taxes for the producers of this plant in the North, Northeast, and semi-arid regions. Petrobrás, aiming to perform in this sense by buying castor bean and sun flower seeds from (of) small farmers, has established a biodiesel production at the Guamaré Polo, in Rio Grande do Norte State.

General extraction – Plant alternatives for producing vegetable oils are not lacking throughout the world, principally in the planet’s tropical belt. But even in cold areas such as the Patagonia region, in Argentina, there are already initiatives to produce biodiesel from the oil of marine algae. In March, the website of the Science and Development Network, SciDevNet, announced an Argentinean enterprise having at its head the company Oil Fox, which made an agreement with the local government to cultivate marine algae in huge ponds in the province of Chubut. With German investments of US$ 20 million, the company announced that it hopes to produce 240,000 tons of marine biodiesel annually on only 300 hectares as against the 600,000 hectares that would be needed for the production of Soya.

In Brazil many alternatives still exist such as babassu, peanuts, cotton seed, souari nut and the pinhão-manso [Jatropha Cursas] (read box), for example, not counting other Amazonian plants still without an established growth. Many things have already been experimented. “Between 1977 and 1980, when we tested various raw materials, a passion fruit juice producer from the state of Ceará named Agrolusa, asked us to attempt the production of diesel from the seeds of this fruit”, recalls Expedito Parente, from Tecbio. “It went well, and his company’s Kombi vans ran for six months on this diesel. But after they verified that the price paid by the cosmetic industry for the oil from the passion seeds was much more compensating.”