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For those wondering: vinasse is the crap left after you distil the fermented mass, to retrieve the alcohol. It should not be an issue, because as mentioned by the text it's a good fertiliser; however law enforcement in most of the Americas does not fucking work, and Brazil is a prime example of that - if it's cheaper to dump it into the river than to store and resell it then producers will do it, laws be damned.

Another issue (not mentioned by the text) is that long-term sugarcane farming desertifies the environment where it's grown. Yeah - it is not sustainable in the long run.

Here's another example that I ran into in Brazil, and ended up making and selling a business out of.

Whey, the by-product of dairy manufacturing, is most cheaply disposed of by feeding to pigs. The excess the pigs can't eat is supposed to be safely disposed of, but this is often deemed too costly, and it ends up in the river. A bribe to the right official will be cheaper anyway.

So I started to buy the stuff, for pennies per decalitre. Dairies didn't have to bribe officials anymore, and the river is spared. My refrigerated truck then brought this enormous amount of whey to my nanofiltration pump (setup with the help of a local chemical engineer), where we split it into Whey Protein Isolate, which is the powder bodybuilders drink. I then became a local supplier for the (at the time) only South American company that produced and marketed protein powders in Brazil, sold my share of the business, and came home a slightly wealthier man.

Every stage of this was a nightmare. The uses of whey have been well documented in the literature since the 1920's, and the equipment is cheap. In engineering terms, it's a completely solved problem. But the bureaucracy....

in austria whey is flavored with fruit and sold as a soft drink
I remember two dairy brands in Brazil doing the same, a decade or so ago. However the whey+juice mix was more expensive than plain fruit juice, and both advertised it as a "fitness alternative", so you barely see it any more.
Is it any good? The taste?
Can you share a story about the bureaucracy and how you’d improve it?
You just need to imagine that for every step of the way (say manufacturing, packaging and transport) there's a bribe (not necessarily to avoid a justified fine) for whatever official was supposed to take care of it. Corruption in South America is pretty much a way of life
No details. It is illegal for Canadian citizens to bribe workers of foreign governments. So, of course, I was able to do everything without ever exchanging money with a foreign official. But, if one were in a position to do so, I imagine things would have proceeded in a much more efficient way.
I'm always kinda stunned by how destructive people can be when money is involved.

I'm not surprised, I completely expect it and do what I can to mitigate it. But it's still shocking. What kind of sociopath builds something and decides "I'll throw this leftover crap where others drink" for decades? And why do they have so much power, so frequently?

Money is always just a proxy. People have been evading responsibility for murder by tossing dead bodies in wells and rivers for millennia.

Whey is an example of ease of rationalization "you're just feeding the fish".

Are bodies toxic to the environment?
> And why do they have so much power, so frequently?

A business managed by a sociopath has a larger margin of profit, due to arseholery like: misleading customers, dumping stuff on rivers, bribing authorities, etc. That makes the business able to expand faster, more resilient to eventualities, and more attractive to vulture capital injecting money in it. Those sociopaths will also see no issue whatsoever on amassing power elsewhere, for the sake of their business.

As such, businesses playing by the rules are outcompeted by the ones managed by sociopaths. Darwin style.

Given Brazil's huge hydro power resources and it's huge solar potential, ethanol based plug-in hybrids with smaller (hence less expensive) batteries could be a great way to move off petroleum fuels while also minimizing the use of ethanol.

Of course that might be a hard sell given the importance of the ethanol production industry in the economy.

But it might be a good strategy for countries that don't yet have the purchasing power to support a market for pure EVs.

Pure EV’s prices keep dropping to the point where oil doesn’t look price competitive 5 years from now let alone ethanol.

The 2023 Chevy Bolt has a 247 mile range and a $27,000 MSRP without government incentives. That’s still a higher cost of ownership than a used ICE, but things are getting a lot closer. https://www.chevrolet.com/electric/bolt-ev-2023

That is, of course, if your Chevy Bolt does end up in flames. According to letters from GM, never park your Bolt under the same roof you live and to be safe, park it away from any structure.
In regards to battery degradation, how much of that range can I expect to see after the first 100000km?
If you assume the Model S and Model X are representative of other EVs, then about 94% of it: https://electrek.co/2018/04/14/tesla-battery-degradation-dat...

And keep in mind that degradation is fastest at the beginning, so at 200000km, you have about 92% of what you started with, not the 88% you'd expect if it were linear.

given the markets involved, look at the electric golf-cart sized cars coming out of China for a more competitive price point of several thousand us dollars, far cheaper than something on the us market.
I keep being told EVs being cost effective are right around the corner, yet the prices for clean energy on my electric bill are 35% higher and government subsidies for the industry are never ending.
That's probably because you're paying the feel-good tax, and not a true accounting of the costs. Just like how oat milk is more expensive than cow's milk at retail, even though oat milk is almost free to produce relative to cow milk.
People are also notoriously bad at managing their money. If you have the money and suck at using it, EVs and solar panels make a lot more sense, and you should actually do it, we really need to scale up those industries.
If you’re buying a new car today the right EV’s can easily have a lower TOC. The used market is based on what was manufactured 5-10+ years ago so it looks very different.

In terms of clean energy, inflation adjusted US wholesale rates fell as we dramatically reduced the grids carbon footprint. 2022 is looking like a major anomaly, but that’s in part because natural gas prices are through the roof due to Russia’s invasion.

> I keep being told EVs being cost effective are right around the corner, yet the prices for clean energy on my electric bill are 35% higher

I don't see how that's relevant. The alternative for your house isn't powering it with gasoline.

> and government subsidies for the industry are never ending

You should expect that when it's still "around the corner".

And it could make sense to continue subsidizing EV purchases once prices are similar. Or even beyond that, if you want new-ish EVs to be competitive with a bigger chunk of used gas cars in upfront price.

How much does it cost to replace the battery?
Ethanol is not a good solution. It's extremely inefficient to take solar radiation and turn it into corn, turn the corn into ethanol and then burn the ethanol for mechanical power.

Just turn the solar radiation into electricity and turn that into power. Solar and EVs are here now.

> Ethanol is not a good solution. It's extremely inefficient to take solar radiation and turn it into corn, turn the corn into ethanol and then burn the ethanol for mechanical power.

Brazil uses sugar cane, which has better energy yield than corn for ethanol, due to it's higher caloric content. But yes, it is less efficient than direct solar to batteries.

> Just turn the solar radiation into electricity and turn that into power. Solar and EVs are here now.

Yes, but large battery vehicles are still to expensive in developing and middle income countries - they are just now getting affordable to the masses in developed countries.

A smaller battery could easily offset 50-80% of ethanol fueled miles because most daily drives are short, so a smaller affordable PHEV with a 20kWh battery could offset a lot of liquid fuel usage.

Sugar cane's advantage over corn is not enough to fix the underlying inefficiency of the entire chain.
Brazillian Ethanol is made with Sugar Cane, not corn. And it is reasonably efficient, much better than corn ethanol that is just stupid.

To make corn ethanol you get an energy loss actually, the energy usage to grow and process the corn, for example to power the tractors and so on, is bigger than the energy you can get burning it.

US government solution for this is spetacularly boneheaded too.

So USA has so much corn because it has corn subsidies. This is the reason for USA using the terrible for health corn syrup too instead of sugar from cane.

Then USA government decided to give ethanol subsidies to incentive green fuels.

Result is people make corn ethanol, get 2 subsidies, pollute a bit and cause a net energy loss.

So USA government decided solution was give a even bigger subsidy to sugar cane ethanol.

Result is Brazillians make sugar cane ethanol, sell to US companies, those companies collect the subsidy from it, buy corn ethanol that has 2 subsidies on that thus is extra cheap, sell back to Brazillians.

So now you have USA government giving 3 subsidies that result in people making a ton of corn ethanol, causing energy loss, and shipping it to Brazil, while Brazillians ship cane ethanol back, the shipping in question being done with Diesel ships.

Sometimes I wonder what the fuck is wrong with USA government to think that such decisions are good idea, wasting a ton of taxpayer money on energy losing production process and encouraging Diesel-based ocean shipping all in the name of "green".

It is not MY tax money though (I am Brazillian) so it is not like I can do anything about it.

Sugar cane ethanol still has incredible energy losses. Processing it into ethanol is an energy loss. Transporting it is a huge energy loss. And burning it is the worst. ICE engines are at best 28% efficient. That's a 70% loss.
Please read TFA. Corn is not mentioned.

Makes me wonder if your comment is literal copypasta, or merely figurative copypasta from US ecoactivism.

Corn vs sugar doesn't matter. It's all the other steps that make ethanol not worth it. I should have said sugar in my comment to be accurate to the article, but by far most ethanol is made from corn due to US corn subsidies which is why I mentioend corn.
This is sugarcane ethanol and it is way more efficient than corn ethanol
ethanol can be easily stored in large quantities and transported where it is needed
Importantly ethanol can be transported over vast distances and stored for long periods of time, both incredible and persistent challenges for electricity.
You're right, but a tank of ethanol will take you farther than batteries.
We already have dual fuel "flex" engines that run on gasoline, ethanol or any mixture of them.

However, ethanol is too expensive south of São Paulo, so it is hardly ever used.

Anyway, a flex/eletric hybrid would be very useful.

>Of course that might be a hard sell given the importance of the ethanol production industry in the economy.

It's less important than it looks like, but it's backed up by a rather nasty political mafia.

At least for SP/PR/SC/RS, a better approach is to simply forget that the Brazilian government exists, and implement measures to reduce fuel consumption. Such as building an actually usable trains infrastructure for goods transportation across cities, and investing further on public transportation for passengers inside large metropolises.

Ethanol have another more important issue: producible quantity. Brazil have peculiar climate in most of the country, it can, most other countries simply can not. That's not a matter of environmental or economical costs but a mere physical feasibility limit.

That's an important aspects too many tend to fail considering, for instance "hey, but we can made antarctic bases with food self-sufficiency", yes, we can, for a single base and very few humans inside. With the work of hundred, thousand of others and a tremendous effort: the fact something is doable and done and does work at a certain scale does not means it can work at every scale.

I admittedly don't know much about this byproduct, and I do see mentioned that it's highly acidic. But if it causes algae blooms it makes me wonder if there's some sort of processing opportunity that could repurpose it for fertilizer.
It's mentioned in the article, but doesn't go into detail about why it hasn't caught on

> Continued problems with vinasse-dumping marred the sugar-ethanol industry’s environmental image, even as specialists encouraged repurposing the nitrogen-heavy byproduct as a fertiliser. Today, compliance with anti-dumping legislation is still not effectively enforced.

From Wikipedia

"In the past, vinasse was a problem in production of ethanol, but vinasse is also a good fertilizer (at least for some time) and a source of methane that can be used to generate heat or electricity. Moreover, other uses of vinasse involving also the formulation of nutritive solutions for hydroponics, formulation of culture media for plant tissue culture and culture media for algal growth."

Seems like it's only a problem because it's being dumped and not being purchased for reuse.

My extended family lives near a place where using it as fertilizer is common. It works wonderfully, also it is incredibly smelly, the reason it is used there is because there are no cities there, just gigantic prairies, as soon you get near a city the smell stops (implying people there aren't using it as fertilizer).
É verdade
Reminder: biofuels made from corn are not sustainable at all.

They compete against plant agriculture for access to land, making food more expensive.

Often they also use a lot of energy, water and produce CO2 during the farming process.

>Reminder: biofuels made from corn are not sustainable at all.

Reminder: you should read the article before commenting, to not make a fool out of yourself.

Maize is not relevant in this discussion. RTA and you'll see why.

Most of Brazil's ethanol is made from sugarcane.
And they produce co2 anyway.

I don't think they capture as much co2 as they release.