ABSTRACT
Developing countries with characteristically weak economies and precarious industrial infrastructures have been seriously hit by the energy crisis. To fully tap the potential of fossil-based fuels and other new renewable sources, huge capital outlays are required that these countries do not have. The trend has thus been toward the small-scale utilization of resources. One area in which developing countries can succeed relatively quickly is fossil fuel supplementation with alternative fuels derived from food and agricultural crops such as sugarcane, cassava, maize, and sorghum. Although the focus has primarily been on the petroleum products as a primary source of transportation fuels, ethanol has attracted a great deal of attention all over the world as an alternative source to petrol or as a blend with petrol to reduce the consumption of petrol. In Brazil, all cars are run on either a 22 to 25% mixture of ethanol with gasoline or pure ethanol. In Brazil, the National Program of Alcohol,
PROALCOOL
, started in November 1975, was created in response to the first petroleum crisis of 1973. This program effectively changed the profile of transportation fuels in the country. For the period 1979-2004, about 5.4 million ethanol-powered cars were produced. In 1998, these ethanol-powered cars consumed about 2 billion gallons of ethanol per year and about 1.4 billion gallons of ethanol was additionally used for producing gasohol (22% ethanol and 78% gasoline) for other cars.
