Fledgling effort underway to create global biofuels market

A global biofuels market is the eventual goal of a partnership that includes the United States and Brazil. Toward that end, the National Institute of Standards and Technology and its counterpart in Brazil plan to hold their second workshop, June 26-29, at the Capitol Hilton in Washington, D.C., according to an update published on the NIST Web site.

The collaboration between the U.S. and Brazil received its official stamp of approval during President Bush’s visit to Brazil last March, when U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorim signed a memorandum of understanding to advance cooperation in biofuels.

Also that month, Brazil, China, India, South Africa, the United States and the European Commission established the International Biofuels Forum for one year, according to the NIST update. (NIST is part of the U.S. Department of Commerce.)

The goal of the Forum is to help create a world market for alternative fuels, IBF officials said in a March press conference at United Nations headquarters in New York City.

The IBF will work towards closer coordination among its members, to set common standards and to achieve the commoditization of biofuels, so that they might eventually be traded like oil, said Antonio Patriota, ambassador of Brazil to the United States.

In response to a question about how much of the fuel consumed in the world might eventually come from biofuels, Eduardo Pereira de Carvalho, the president of UNICA, a group representing 70 per cent of ethanol producers in Brazil, said that 2 or 3 per cent was most likely initially. That figure could someday rise to as high as 30 per cent, however. Given his expectation that oil prices would climb in the coming years, he said that biofuels were an “important participant of the new energy matrix of the twenty-first century”.

Patriota, the ambassador of Brazil to the United States, said, “Biofuels constitute a viable economic alternative for the partial substitution of fossil fuels and the diversification of the world’s energy mix.”

Patriota added that the introduction of biofuels would benefit developed countries through increasing energy security by reducing the dependence on fossil fuels and contributing to lower greenhouse gas emissions. For developing countries, greater use of biofuels would significantly reduce dependence on imported oil, redressing trade imbalances and freeing up income for investments in health, education and social programs, he said.