Brazil gets tanked up on alcohol to clear the air

 Letter from São Paulo: Running on pure alcohol and named after the legendary beach in Rio, Brazil has unveiled the latest addition to its booze-fuelled transport fleet - the Ipanema, a single-propeller aircraft powered by the juice extracted from sugar cane.

Individual aircraft have been adapted to run on alcohol before, but Brazil is proudly boasting that the Ipanema is the first commercially produced, alcohol-fuelled aircraft. It marks another aviation first for a country in which every schoolchild is taught that local pioneer Alberto Santos Dumont, and neither of the American Wright brothers, was the first man to fly.

The Ipanema is modelled on a cropduster built in Brazil since the 1960s but has an engine designed to run on an ethanol solution. With its cleaner burn it produces no smoke or plume and so is kinder to the environment than traditional aviation fuel.

But it gets even better, environmentally speaking. While the sugar-cane plants from which the ethanol is distilled are growing in the field they absorb the harmful greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere by burning the alcohol, a virtuous cycle which petroleum and its products are incapable of.

But how does an alcohol-fuelled aircraft fly? "It handles very well, the same if not better than with regular fuel," says Pedro Paulo Formehl, who bought the first of the Ipanemas to roll off the São Paulo production line and which he has press-ganged into his cropduster fleet in Brazil's booming agricultural interior.

"With ethanol you get more horsepower, which means more power on takeoff and more speed when up in the air," says Satoshi Yokota, the executive in charge of development at Embraer, the Brazilian aircraft manufacturer which makes the Ipanema. "A cleaner burn also means less maintenance and a longer life for the engine."

And then there is the question of cost. At €190,000 the ethanol version of the Ipanema costs €11,000 more than one using regular aviation fuel. But a litre of ethanol in Brazil is a mere €0.35 versus a whopping €1.43 for aviation fuel. With a full tank at 950 litres, owners save over €1,000 every time they fill up with ethanol.

With the world's biggest sugar-cane crop and second-largest fleet of small aircraft, Embraer sees a big potential market within Brazil for alcohol aircraft. The resurgence of the country's alcohol-powered car fleet shows what success might mean.

Cars running on alcohol first appeared after the former military government decided to tap the country's abundant supply of sugar cane for fuel as a response to the oil shocks of the 1970s.

By the 1980s most cars in Brazil were running on alcohol. But problems with supply in the early 1990s saw the programme fall out of favour. Consumers are only now being coaxed back with the offer of cars that can switch from petrol to alcohol and back, hybrids that account for roughly a third of all cars now sold in Brazil, more than anywhere else in the world.

For drivers it makes sense. At €0.35 a litre, ethanol is less than a quarter the price of petrol. And it makes sense for the country as it lessens dependence on imported oil, paid for in precious hard currency.

But even regular petrol in Brazil today is mixed up with alcohol. All "petrol" in the country is in fact a blend called "gasohol", a three-to-one mix of petrol and alcohol. The country adds the cheaper locally produced ethanol to petrol so as to further reduce dependence on oil imports while reducing greenhouse gas emissions, even for drivers not driving alcohol-powered cars.

In a world where the Kyoto treaty has come into force and some leading economists predict oil will climb over $100 a barrel, Brazil is now planning to take this cheap and clean ethanol industry international with the aim of becoming the main global player in the rapidly expanding renewable fuels (biofuels) industry - the Saudi Arabia of ethanol, so to speak.

"The major elements needed for renewable fuels are sunlight, rainfall and land, and Brazil has more of these than any other country, with year-round sunshine and abundant rainfall stretching over a huge landmass," says Osvaldo Stella Martins, a researcher at Brazil's National Centre for Biomass Research.

This abundance of heat, water and land means Brazil is already the world's biggest distiller of ethanol and is ramping up production to supply the alcohol to oil-importing countries such as India and Japan that are looking to ethanol as a source of cheap, clean energy to help them comply with the Kyoto treaty and take some of the sting out of the steep rise in oil prices.

While the oil sheikhs will not be worried just yet, the planet can breathe a little easier thanks to this alternative energy giant.