Yes, you can run your car on fryer oil. Maybe even that Bradley tank, or the Millennium Falcon.  But like many, do you want to, and can you afford it?

Ethanol remains a popular fuel option for those who have the ingenuity to piece together their own engines (people have been doing so for decades). But the biofuel explosion that grasped the world in the in the first few years of the new millennium has lost favor. The oilfields of Saudi Arabia might have been eclipsed by the cornfields of Nebraska. Brazil was second to the United Stated in global corn for biofuel production, according to a recent piece featured in Scientific American.

The price of liquid ethanol is falling: it is 26% lower than is was at this time in 2008, the article says.  Brazil has about 400 ethanol plants, but 41 of them have closed.  Lula, Brazil’s president, thought that cleaner-burning ethanol could be a boon for both global climate-change concerns and Brazil’s economy.

However, writes Claudio Angelo,

“Five years on, Lula’s vision has tarnished. Biofuels are falling from grace around the world as critics charge that devoting millions of hectares of agricultural land to fuel crops is driving up food prices and that the climate benefits of biofuels are modest at best.”

80/20% Ethanol/petrol blends are more popular and affordable than pure ethanol and most consumption comes from this blend.

Angelo traces the root of the present problem to the economic crisis of 2008, when money to new investments for the industry dried up just as the ethanol sector was expanding.  Many ethanol companies were already in debt, and fell back on harvesting old fields instead of investing in new ones.  A country that was supposed to be leading the ethanol revolution found itself in the position of importing 1.5 Billion liters of corn ethanol form the US, writes Angelo.

The Brazilian government, meanwhile, was offering tax subsidies on the sale of new cars and–to control inflation–freeze the price of petrol and diesel.

This is the sort of story that seems to keep happening all over the green energy sector.  Countries (many developing ones) made bets on alternative fuels as a source of economic growth and a step toward sound environmental policy.  But it seems that these industries rely heavily on support from governments, as is the case with solar panels, and that they are very vulnerable to changes in the oil sector–one wonders what will happen to these industries as the shale oil industry grows.