Expansion of sugarcane cultivation in Brazil for ethanol production in areas not under environmental protection or reserved for food production could potentially replace up to 13.7% of world crude oil consumption and reduce global emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) by as much as 5.6% by 2045.
Expansion of sugarcane cultivation in Brazil for ethanol production in areas not under environmental protection or reserved for food production could potentially replace up to 13.7% of world crude oil consumption and reduce global emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) by as much as 5.6% by 2045.
These estimates come from an international study with Brazilian participation, whose results were published on October 23 in the journal Nature Climate Change.
The study set out to investigate how expansion of sugarcane ethanol could help limit the rise in average global temperatures to less than 2 °C by reducing CO2 emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels, as agreed by the 196 countries that signed the Paris Climate Agreement in December 2015.
The study was conducted as part of a project supported by FAPESP and by the National Institute of Science and Technology for Bioethanol (INCT Bioethanol). The participating researchers are affiliated with the University of Campinas’s Agricultural Engineering School (FEAGRI-UNICAMP) and the University of São Paulo’s Bioscience Institute (IB-USP) and Luiz de Queiroz College of Agriculture (ESALQ-USP). They collaborated with colleagues at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), Iowa State University and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications in the United States, the University of Copenhagen and Danish Energy Association in Denmark, and Lancaster University in the United Kingdom.
Read more at Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo
Image: Expansion of sugarcane cultivation for biofuel in areas not under environmental protection or reserved for food production could also reduce global emissions of carbon dioxide by up to 5.6%, according to a study by researchers in Brazil, the US and Europe (photo: CNPEM)
