The expected expansion of bioenergy in Brazil has raised concerns about the implications for its current comfortable situation of water resources availability. As water availability within the Brazilian territory is uneven, the bioenergy expansion might represent different impacts on the water resources of different regions. This work assessed, at the municipal and state levels, (i) the green and blue water footprint ( WF ) of the main liquid biofuels produced in Brazil (sugarcane ethanol and biodiesel); (ii) the impacts of full and salvage irrigation strategies on sugarcane WF ; and (iii) the water demand for different agricultural land use scenarios. For the states of São Paulo, Minas Gerais, and Goiás, the WF of sugarcane ethanol was evaluated around 71 L MJ ^–1 , while in the state of Paraná it reaches 100 L MJ ^–1 . For biodiesel, values were between 40 and 50 L MJ ^–1 . The blue WF was negligible for both biofuels, as the use of irrigation is still limited in Brazil today. Additionally, the analysis showed that full and salvage irrigation strategies would lead to lower WFs in all states considered, though in the expense of larger volumes of blue WF . Regarding land use change, the results suggested that additional evapotranspiration is occurring due to sugarcane expansion. Nevertheless, given the current situation of the Brazilian water basins, there is no evidence that sugarcane expansion over these areas will lead to critical pressure on water resources. © 2013 Society of Chemical Industry and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd

It is expected that Brazil could play an important role in biojet fuel (BJF) production in the future due to the long experience in biofuel production and the good agro‐ecological conditions. However, it is difficult to quantify the techno‐economic potential of BJF because of the high spatio‐temporal variability of available land, biomass yield, and infrastructure as well as the technological developments in BJF production pathways. The objective of this research is to assess the recent and future techno‐economic potential of BJF production in Brazil and to identify location specific optimal combinations of biomass crops and technological conversion pathways. In total, thirteen production routes (supply chains) are assessed through the combination of various biomass crops and BJF technologies. We consider temporal land use data to identify potential land availability for biomass production. With the spatial distribution of the land availability and potential yield of biomass crops, biomass production potential and costs are calculated. The BJF production cost are calculated by taking into account the development in the technological pathways and in plant scales. We estimate the techno‐economic potential by determining the minimum BJF total costs and comparing this with the range of fossil jet fuel prices. The techno‐economic potential of BJF production ranges from 0 to 6.4 EJ in 2015 and between 1.2 – 7.8 EJ in 2030, depending on the reference fossil jet fuel price, which varies from 19 US$/GJ to 65 US$/GJ across the airports. The techno‐economic potential consists of a diverse set of production routes. The Northeast and Southeast region of Brazil present the highest potentials with several viable production routes, whereas the remaining regions only have a few promising production routes. The maximum techno‐economic potential of BJF in Brazil could meet almost half of the projected global jet fuel demand towards 2030.

As the automotive industry steers towards electromobility and electric vehicle adoption surges, Brazil and other Latin-American countries remain laggards. The Brazilian scenario exhibits unique features, such as a powerful automotive sector with large investments in internal combustion engine technology and a well-established biofuels market based on flex-fuel technology. Although energy security, urban air pollution, greenhouse gas emissions mitigation, and technological advantage have been common drivers for the adoption of electric vehicles worldwide, the Brazilian immediate motivations are different, and the biofuels business ecosystem is likely to transform the path for electromobility. High tag price and public charging infrastructure absence have deeply discouraged electric vehicles adoption. A lack of regulation and a national consensus about the role of electric vehicles have been notorious. In fact, only in 2018 did the electricity regulatory agency (ANEEL) issue a resolution permitting the sale of electricity for recharging. The objective of this review was to create an outlook of the Brazilian transportation landscape. We identified relevant players, public charging infrastructure initiatives, market and other barriers, and regulation actions by consulting academic literature, media sources, and reports. We do not claim to predict the evolution of electrification. Instead, we aim to consolidate the information which can be used for decision support or strategy definition among entrepreneurs or policymakers. The main findings here are the necessity of a model for electrification able to create a synergy with biofuels and the urgency of having well-defined policies on what Brazil wants from electromobility.

This work brings a refined estimation of the land use change and derived CO₂ emissions associated with sugarcane cultivation, including changes in management practices and refined land-use carbon stocks, over the last two decades for Brazil’s center–south and north regions. The analysis was carried out at the rural property level, considering spatially explicit land conversion data. With the refinements, we found a net carbon removal of 9.8 TgCO₂∙yr⁻¹ in sugarcane cultivation areas in the 2000–2020 period, which was due to the expansion of sugarcane over poor quality pastures (55% of the gross removals), croplands (15%) and mosaic (14%) areas, and the transition from the conventional burned harvesting to unburned (16%). Moreover, 98.4% of expansion was over existent agricultural areas. Considering all the land use changes within sugarcane-producing rural properties, the net removal is even larger, of 17 TgCO₂∙yr⁻¹, which is due to vegetation recovery. This suggests that public policies and private control mechanisms might have been effective not only to control deforestation but also to induce carbon removals associated with sugarcane cultivation. These results indicate sugarcane production system and derived products as contributors to net carbon removals in the land sector in Brazil and should be considered for both bioenergy and agricultural sustainability evaluation.