Brazil's made from sugar cane waste

Dry stalks fly as tractors rattle along Brazil's sweltering sugarcane fields. They yank up the plants and truck them off to aging factories. This is the frontier of a new energy revolution, one powered by leaves, stalks, and organic waste instead of fossil fuels. It's 100 percent renewable. So you're using, as you said, waste or biomass to produce a field. João Alberto Abreu is the technology director at Raisin, the world's biggest producer of sugar and ethanol. Their Costa Pinto mill in Sao Paulo state has been pumping it out for decades. After years of research, they now want to produce what's called cellulosic ethanol from the plant debris left in the fields and the fibrous bagasse churned out by the mill. This is the raw material, dry biomass, and this mountain is enough to fuel the cars of a small city for two months. Called a second-generation biofuel, it's made from abundant renewable resources, but expensive compared to ethanol made from sugarcane and corn because it's more difficult to break down the cellulose in these plants. So it's not produced on a large scale. Raisin is hoping to change that. They're going to build a new industrial-scale plant that will be completed in 2014. You can use the same supply chain that you used to bring the sugarcane to also bring the biomass together. So you save a lot of money integrating the two plants together. Brazil has a long history with ethanol-fueled cars. A breakthrough came in 2003 when flex-fuel cars were introduced, which could switch between gas and ethanol. Lately, more of a burden than a blessing for ethanol since gas prices have been kept artificially low by the government keen on controlling inflation. At Raisin, a joint venture between Royal Dutch Shell and Brazil's COSAN, they're optimistic. I'm absolutely convinced that we will surprise the market with how feasible, how economic it will be to produce second-generation ethanol. Initially, it would be exported to the United States, which pays a premium for second-generation biofuels. To meet expected demand, they want to build a total of eight plants in ten years. But it's a race not only in Brazil but around the world to be the first to produce cellulosic ethanol on a commercially viable basis, a race that could transform our fuels and double productivity in these fields, making the most of both the sugar cane and the waste. Shasta Darlington, CNN, Piracicaba, Brazil.