Encontro de Energia no Meio Rural
Agrener

Abstract

CHOHFI, Felipe Moreton and CORTEZ, Luis Augusto Barbosa. Melhoria da competitividade do etanol nas exportações. In Proceedings of the 6. Encontro de Energia no Meio Rural, 2006, Campinas (SP, Brazil) [online]. 2006 [cited 20 April 2024]. Available from: <http://www.proceedings.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=MSC0000000022006000200008&lng=en&nrm=iso> .

The production and use of fuel ethanol as a source of renewable energy in the transport sector has been expanding in many countries of the world and its efficiency in the substitution of gasoline is already proven. However, its cost of production in some countries is quite high. On the other hand, in Brazil, ethanol for some reasons is very competitive from the economic point of view. This low cost, has lead an interest by developed countries to import this product from Brazil in a potential market. From the varios itens that compose the cost of ethanol production are important and will be analysed in this work. Large distilleries with surrounding independent producers of sugarcane syrup are proposed. The syrup would be transported saving in transport costs. Saving due to economies of scale and conversion efiiciencies can be significant in these distilleries due to the great quantity of raw-materials processed. The viability of implementation of this competing strategy instead of the present in the sugarcane agroindustry will be discussed through an economic analysis.

Keywords : Ethanol costs; agroindustry; economies of scale; transport of cane; international market.