To emulate the successful Ethanol Program of Brazil, which is clearly an instrument to reduce CO2 emissions from gasoline, a number of countries have adopted ethanol mandates to introduce ethanol in their automotive fleets. As a consequence, it is necessary to subsidize producers at a rate of approximately 11 billion dollars per year mainly in the United States where ethanol is produced from corn.

Table 1 shows the existing mandates in a number of countries and projections of the amount of ethanol that will be needed by 2020/2022.

Present gasoline consumption in these countries is 943.2 billion liters, 82% of present gasoline consumption.

The potential demand for 2020/2022 on the basis of existing mandates [7] is

178.7 billion liters.

Clearly, an enormous effort will have to be made to meet the projected demand for 2020 in the basis of either first — or second-generation technologies.

aSource: From [11] bSource: From [7]

2 Summary

A discussion is made of the policies adopted by the Brazilian government in the mid 1970s of last century to increase the production of ethanol from sugarcane. The suc­cess of such policies can be assessed by the enormous increase in production (from

0. 6 billion liter in 1975/1978 to 27.6 billion in 2009/2010) as well as the sharp decline in production costs which turned this renewable fuel competitive with gasoline.