Marina Sarruf*
marina.sarruf@anba.com.br
São Paulo – Starting in December, the city of São Paulo, the largest city in Brazil, located in the southeast of the country, is going to be the first city in the Americas to have an ethanol-powered bus. The vehicle, which was released yesterday (23), is a project developed by the University of São Paulo (USP), executed by the National Centre for Reference in Biomass (Cenbio) under the Institute of Electrotechnics and Energy (IEE). "This project has a social and environmental impact. I hope that it is expanded to other cities in Brazil, becoming a project of reference to other cities in the world," stated the IEE director, José Aquiles Baesso Grimoni.
The main objective is to reduce pollution, providing incentives to the use of ethanol instead of diesel, which is currently used in urban public transportation in Brazil. The new vehicle is going to operate for a year in the city of São Paulo, between the neighbourhoods of Jabaquara and São Mateus, as a test for demonstration of viability.
According to the coordinator of the project, José Roberto Moreira, the use of ethanol in public transportation reduces carbon monoxide emissions by 92%. "Now the idea is to have the bus operating together with other buses in the fleet to make comparisons," he said.
The forecast is to have another two buses circulating next year. The mayor of the city of São Paulo, Gilberto Kassab, who participated in the event for release of the vehicle, showed great interest in the concept and said that he is going to discuss the possibility of placing at least 10 vehicles of the sort in operation in 2008. According to him, the city currently counts on 15,000 vehicles for public transportation.
Total investment in the project was 1.6 million Brazilian reais (US$ 890,000 at current exchange rates). One third of the total was financed by the European Union, which is also promoting program Bioethanol for Sustainable Transport (BEST) in seven European countries and in China. The remains was sponsored and supported by eight transportation organisations, associations and operators in Brazil.
According to Moreira, a similar experience was promoted in the 1980s, but it did not go ahead. "The results were excellent in the pollution aspect, but the vehicle was very expensive," he said, referring to the small difference in the cost of diesel and ethanol at the time.
According to Moreira, diesel oil currently costs almost double the price of alcohol, and there is still a tendency for further elevation of the price of oil. However, the buses consume approximately 60% more ethanol than diesel to cover the same distance and there is also the need of adding the cost of an additive for promotion of ignition through compression. We hope to manage to get some kind of tax break in the value added state tax (ICMS) on ethanol, as there is for diesel," he said.
Moreira also added that the adaptation of diesel engines to ethanol requires few changes and the price of the final vehicle should be on average 50,000 reais (US$ 28,000) more expensive. The engine and the chassis for the new vehicle were imported from Swedish company Scania, which has a subsidiary in Brazil. Sweden already has a fleet of around 600 ethanol-powered buses.
Another company that participated in the project was Marcopolo, a Brazilian maker of urban, highway and small bus bodies. Other companies that also participated are Swedish chemical company Sekab, which supplied the additive for the ethanol, Coopersucar, which imported the first load of ethanol with additives, Petrobras, which is going to distribute ethanol to the operators, and the São Paulo Sugarcane Agroindustry Union (Unica), which supplied the ethanol for the tests.
Currently, 10% of the Brazilian vehicle fleet is already composed of flex-fuel vehicles, technology which permits the use of alcohol, petrol or any mixture of both fuels. Alcohol has been used in a large scale throughout the country, in passenger vehicles, since the 1970s. Brazil is now the second main world producer of ethanol, with production of 17.8 billion litres.
Jabaquara–São Mateus
The bus route between Jabaquara and São Mateus has a fleet of 200 vehicles and covers a distance of 33 kilometres. According to figures supplied by the Metropolitan Urban Transports Company (EMTU), 200,000 passengers use the 33 lines in the route each day. The vehicles cover destinations in four cities: São Paulo, Diadema, São Bernardo do Campo and Santo André and all together make 4,000 trips a day.
*Translated by Mark Ament
