São Carlos, Sunday Morning

Filed by Steve Ritter

Located in the center of São Paulo state, in southern Brazil, São Carlos is a quiet city of an estimated 100,000 people. It’s in the middle of the country’s orange- and sugarcane-growing region, where we have been exploring Brazil’s biofuels industry. Today I woke up and looked from the hotel window to see the sun rising through a partly cloudy sky.

Dante’s Catalysis

Filed by Steve Ritter 

When the American Chemical Society’s Brad Miller wrote his Discovery Corps Fellowship proposal for our Brazil trip, he envisioned including students from the U.S. and Brazil in the biofuels research partnership that he hopes to create. As part of his plan, Miller searched abstracts for the ACS national meeting in San Francisco last August to find the “best of biorenewables” presentations made by students.

Photo Journey: Making The Most Of Sugarcane

Filed by Erika Engelhaupt and Steve Ritter

EMERALD CITY Across this sugarcane field lies the city of Ribeirão Preto; its name translates to “little black river.” The city of about half a million people lies at the heart of the world’s largest ethanol-producing region and is home to 26 of the 128 ethanol plants in São Paulo state. About 70% of Brazil’s ethanol comes out of São Paulo.

Beyond Biowillie

Filed by Erika Engelhaupt

Today, we rode in style—biodiesel style. Sure, it may not have panned out when Willie Nelson teamed up with celebrities to brand his own biodiesel; last week, the company reported $63 million in annual losses. But the fuel powering us in Brazil is on the cutting edge of renewable fuels research, and the scientists working on it hope to develop a worldwide market for the stuff.

 

Our visit with researchers at the University of Campinas began as we hopped into three experimental biodiesel vehicles from the Laboratory for Development of Clean Technology (its Portuguese acronym is LADETEL). The lab tests new biodiesel blends that are made from some exotic renewable sources, by U.S. standards: palm oil, soybean oil, and even castor oil (yum!).

 

Miguel Dabdoub of the University of São Paulo directs LADETEL. Today he proudly demonstrated his latest concoction, a blend of 30% biodiesel (in this case, made from 75% soy and 25% castor) with 70% diesel fuel (the old-fashioned fossil-fuel kind).

 

First Stop: EMBRAPA Agricultural Instrumentation

 

Filed by Steve Ritter

 

After a three-hour ride from the airport and checking into our hotel in São Carlos, we wasted no time in getting started with our tour by visiting EMBRAPA Instrumentação Agropecuária. You have to love these Portuguese spellings.

 

EMBRAPA, which stands for the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corp., is Brazil’s equivalent to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It has some 40 research centers spread around the country, and the Agricultural Instrumentation Center, located in São Carlos, does just what its name implies: The center develops analytical methods and instrumentation for agricultural research.

 

Alan MacDiarmid Won’t Be Making This Trip

Filed by Steve Ritter

Alan G. MacDiarmid of the University of Pennsylvania, who recently passed away at age 79, was best known for codiscovering and helping to develop plastics that conduct electricity. He shared the 2000 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on conducting polymers (C&EN, Feb. 12, page 16).

In recent years, MacDiarmid had become interested in “agri-energy,” the field of converting biomass, in particular agricultural wastes, into fuels and chemicals. He had traveled to Brazil on a number of occasions to study the country’s biofuels industry and served as an adviser to the Brazilian government in preparing a strategic plan for biofuels development.

ACS’s Brad Miller, who organized the current trip to Brazil, met with MacDiarmid last year and invited him to participate this week. MacDiarmid enthusiastically agreed, and he was to deliver the plenary address at the upcoming symposium. But MacDiarmid became ill during the past year and died on Feb. 7.

Are We There Yet?

Filed by Erika Engelhaupt

Washington, D.C. to Miami: two-and-a-half hours by plane. Miami to São Paulo, Brazil: eight hours, one overnight trip, and approximately zero hours of sleep. But finally seeing those sugarcane fields really is priceless.

Into The Great Blue Yonder

Filed by Steve Ritter

Even for veteran travelers, the thought of taking an airline flight ups your anxiety level at least one or two notches. You know it’s relatively safe to fly, but there’s always that menacing thought in the back of your mind that something could go wrong.

So the last thing you would need to read in the newspaper a few days before your flight is that the air-traffic control where you are heading is not what it should be. That’s the situation Erika and I are facing along with several of our cotravelers here in Brazil this week.

What The Biofuels Fuss Is All About

Filed by Steve Ritter

Our trip to Brazil this week comes at an interesting time. Biodiesel and ethanol have captured the imaginations of soybean and corn farmers in the U.S. and soybean and sugarcane growers in Brazil—as well as lots of entrepreneurs—as a pathway to handsome financial gains. The governments of both the U.S. and Brazil view biofuels as a means for achieving “energy independence” and as yet another way to apply political leverage. For scientists, biofuels represent a new opportunity for international scientific collaborations.

Brazil!

The land of Carnaval, soccer, sunny beaches, samba, the Amazon rainforest, and … biofuels. Beginning on May 23, a contingent of U.S. researchers, government officials, and American Chemical Society staff members will venture south to meet counterparts in Brazil for a 10-day tour of biofuels research centers and a concluding symposium. This seminal event is designed to encourage sustainable research collaborations among chemists in the U.S. and Brazil who have interest in converting biomass to fuels and chemicals.

Environmental Science & Technology’s Erika D. Engelhaupt and C&EN’s Stephen K. Ritter are tagging along. They will be posting daily dispatches of news and their observations of Brazilian science and culture.