At Ethanol Producer Magazine, we follow the Brazilian ethanol industry from afar. We cover news from UNICA, the Brazil ethanol industry organization, and follow up on company announcements. The Brazil sugarcane crop has been down the past couple of years, primarily due to drought, we understand.

Recent reports suggest there are other factors, too. A few weeks ago, we covered a report out of Brazil saying that sugarcane production isn’t expected to rebound to former levels quickly. Sugarcane fields can be harvested multiple times over several years, but eventually need to be replanted. Average yields are dropping, indicating the replanting is overdue and it may be a while before yields recover, even if precipitation returns to normal levels.

Another story suggests there may be other issues. Associate editor Matt Soberg recently wrote about a California company installing its membrane technology in a plant in Brazil to remove water from vinasse, sugarcane’s version of thin stillage – the watery waste after ethanol is distilled. In the corn ethanol process in the U.S., thin stillage is evaporated, reduced to syrup that is generally added to the distillers grains. In Brazil, vinasse is often spread on fields. “Vinasse contains phenolic compounds that build up in soil and reduce crop yields,” Matt writes, “and previously used crop rotation methods became futile, due to the increased phenolic buildup.” The new technology from New Logic Research Inc. is an energy efficient method to reduce the vinasse volume by 70 percent and recover useable water.

These two insights into Brazilian ethanol production show that the productive sugarcane industry has its vulnerabilities, too. We often hear about sugarcane ethanol’s good GHG emissions profile, a result of sugarcane’s high yields as well as the industry’s use of bagasse and crop residues for process power. A recent Brazil biomass industry report put some numbers behind that. The 438 sugar-ethanol plants there process roughly equal amounts of sugar and ethanol from the sugarcane crop each year, with about 140 million tons of bagasse left over from the process and 150 million tons of straw. About one-third of the ethanol process power comes from the bagasse and another third from the straw.

 Associate editor Holly Jessen is working on a feature for the January issue of the magazine, digging into other issues. I look forward to learning more about Brazil ethanol—the U.S. industry’s biggest competitor.