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Increased estimates of air-pollution emissions from Brazilian sugar-cane ethanol

A Corrigendum to this article was published on 28 March 2012

This article has been updated

Abstract

Accelerating biofuel production has been promoted as an opportunity to enhance energy security, offset greenhouse-gas emissions and support rural economies. However, large uncertainties remain in the impacts of biofuels on air quality and climate1,2. Sugar-cane ethanol is one of the most widely used biofuels, and Brazil is its largest producer3. Here we use a life-cycle approach to produce spatially and temporally explicit estimates of air-pollutant emissions over the whole life cycle of sugar-cane ethanol in Brazil. We show that even in regions where pre-harvest field burning has been eliminated on half the croplands, regional emissions of air pollutants continue to increase owing to the expansion of sugar-cane growing areas, and burning continues to be the dominant life-cycle stage for emissions. Comparison of our estimates of burning-phase emissions with satellite estimates of burning in São Paulo state suggests that sugar-cane field burning is not fully accounted for in satellite-based inventories, owing to the small spatial scale of individual fires. Accounting for this effect leads to revised regional estimates of burned area that are four times greater than some previous estimates. Our revised emissions maps thus suggest that biofuels may have larger impacts on regional climate forcing and human health than previously thought.

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Figure 1: Comparisons of life-cycle emissions for sugar-cane ethanol in Brazil and conventional liquid fuels.
Figure 2: Estimated life-cycle emissions of ethanol in Brazil from crop year 2000 to 2008 (crop year is from April to January the following year).
Figure 3: Temporal variations of PM2.5 emission from biomass burning.
Figure 4: Fraction of each grid cell burned by three approaches.

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Change history

  • 06 March 2012

    In the version of this Letter originally published, there was an error in the affiliation for M. Mena-Carrasco. This has been corrected in the HTML and PDF versions of the Letter.

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Acknowledgements

We thank B. Rudorff for Canasat data and for helpful comments and suggestions. J.E.C. was funded by NSF (CBET-0955141). M.M-C was funded by FONDECYT (11090084).

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C-C.T. and J.E.C. developed the emissions model. All authors contributed to the analysis of results and writing of the manuscript.

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Correspondence to J. E. Campbell.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Tsao, CC., Campbell, J., Mena-Carrasco, M. et al. Increased estimates of air-pollution emissions from Brazilian sugar-cane ethanol. Nature Clim Change 2, 53–57 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate1325

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