According to an article in The New Economic Times, Fiat is planning to launch a new ethanol-powered engine for the Brazilian market. Ethanol is widely used for fuel in Brazil and half of the country's sugar cane crops are currently used for its production. Fiat intends the motor to be run on fuel that the ethanol producers create themselves, saving on taxes. What is most interesting about this story, though, is that it seems the new engine will be based on a current diesel block. In fact, a small amount of diesel fuel is required to run the engine.

"Use of additives (in ethanol) makes running (an engine) dangerous, subject to explosions," according to Fiat Powertrain Technologies product development engineer Joao Irineu Medeiros. "The diesel will be just enough for ignition and the ethanol will complete the combustion," he adds. It sounds like the new Fiat design will be a compression ignition engine running on e-diesel. Instead of being mixed at the pump, though, Fiat is planning to keep the fuels separate until injected into the engine. Proper tuning would be essential, which would explain why Fiat needs until 2010 to bring this engine to market.

[Source: The New Economic Times]

This past week, Bloomberg Television aired a documentary on the Brazilian ethanol industry called "Deadly Brew: The Human Toll of Ethanol." With a name like that, you can probably guess that the filmmakers have a certain viewpoint on the way ethanol is made from sugarcane in Brazil. Well, the Brazilian Sugarcane Industry Association (UNICA) is not happy with the film, and has put out a statement (available after the break) that calls the movie "Dangerously Misleading and Out-of-Context."

UNICA has 101 member companies, and the group's president and CEO, Marcos Jank, calls "Deadly Brew" seriously out-of-date. Jank said that, "Bloomberg appears more interested in showing impressive footage of a fire burning in the night than explaining that this is how straw is cleared virtually wherever sugarcane is harvested in the world." The statement also includes a list of what UNICA calls "misrepresentations" in the film. You can read all these claims after the jump.

I haven't seen the film and I haven't been to Brazil to see the conditions for myself, but my guess is that we'll get a response from the Deadly Brew team in the near future.

Related:

• Bloomberg to air documentary about Brazilian ethanol worker labor conditions
• São Paulo searching for cleaner ethanol through mechanization

[Source: UNICA - Brazil's Sugarcane Industry Association]