THE GULF crisis has come to the rescue of Proalcohol, the Brazilian
programme which has developed ethanol from sugar- cane as a fuel for 4 million
of the country’s 13 million cars. The government is to revive the programme,
threatened by high production costs (ethanol costs $40 a barrel and has
had to be heavily subsidised to make it competitive with petrol) and recent
distribution problems.
The government also plans to stimulate research into making sugar-cane
plantations more productive, and into the scope for generating electricity
from by-products of sugar-cane distillation.
