Monday, November 15, 2010

Brazil's Potential Role in Ethanol Trade

This year, Brazil’s exports have tracked at a level 50% below last year’s exports.  It is our opinion that Brazil’s participation in the international fuel ethanol market is going to be very limited over the next two years.  The following is a list of factors that will contribute to keeping Brazil off the fuel ethanol export market:

  •          Dry weather conditions have reduced sugarcane yields per acre by 5% or more below forecast this harvest season.
  •          The poor weather conditions during the last two years have conspired to disrupt the typical replanting share of 20% of the cultivated acreage.  This has left the industry with a substantially older crop in the field that yields less cane than younger sugarcane.  It will take at least another growing season to remedy this imbalance in the sugarcane crop.
  •          Sugar prices are again at record levels, and it appears that the sugar industry will not be able to replenish stocks this year, leaving the sugar market fundamentally tight for at least another year. 
  •          Higher sugar prices will continue the favoring of sugar production in Brazil, where mills can swing approximately 1 billion liters of ethanol production towards sugar.
  •          High sugar prices generating copious amounts of cash, coupled with the government loan program for ethanol inventory, has allowed mills to show market discipline and not dump ethanol onto the market to generate cash.  This is evidenced by the industry holding more than 2 billion liters more of inventory than last year at this point in the harvest, allowing the mills to maintain high ethanol prices.
  •          The startup of significant chemical demand to produce green plastics.  Braskem’s new polyethylene facility will consume 500 million liters per year of ethanol starting next year.
  •          The continued growth of the flex-fuel vehicle (FFV) fleet by 2.7 million vehicles per year.  If these FFVs shift from E25 to 100% hydrous ethanol, they have the potential to consume an additional 3.5 billion liters per year of ethanol.  FFV fuel demand is very elastic and will respond to price quickly.   Higher prices this year have reduced ethanol demand by over 1 billion liters as the FFV fleet has responded to high ethanol prices relative to gasoline.  The overall size of the FFV fleet is estimated at 11.7 million vehicles by the end of 2010.  In our opinion, this is the single largest reason why Brazil, at least for the next several years, will not be a major exporter of ethanol due to the potential for a huge surge in demand domestically when the prices are set accordingly.

1 comment:

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