The obvious question here seems to me to be, what if they just burned their own biofuel? How much would that increase the cost/price?
At least some of these operations have to be running at some kind of net gain. It's really about price in the end. I've heard breaking down switchgrass in giant vats with microbes is going pretty well.
Eventually at some future point, we will need large scale biofuels at least for jet fuel. Because however long we might draw it out, we will run out of oil (better yet, we choose to stop using it, but, you know). The market will pay whatever it takes. The problem right now is that this seems so far off in the future and so impossible to 'time' that markets don't care yet.
However ethanol simply can't be used for heavy duty trucks and ships (which, you know, is 95% or more of goods transports in Brazil since there is almost no rail) which defeats much of the point.
At least the general population can shift to ethanol when supply market gets crazy which helps amortize the whole supply chain, but it still ends up affecting everyone just to a slightly lesser degree.
Buy yeah, corn or soy based ethanol is just insane to do at all. Sugar-based only makes sense in an increasingly unstable global order.
What do you mean? Brazil's an oil exporter. The sugar-based stuff's only economically feasible because of EU subsidies flowing into Brazil.