The new biofuel law that entered into force on March 19 went unnoticed, as also passed law for the promotion and development of bioenergetics that was published in the Official Gazette of the Federation on February 1, 2008, which preceded him.
The repealed law was almost dead letter and everything indicates that something similar could happen with the current one because few have been interested in addressing their pros and cons. The entire narrative of the media has focused on the fact that the legal changes published on March 18, the day of the oil expropriation, buried the energy reform of Enrique Peña Nieto, of 2013.
In 2008, a few months after the law for the production of biofuels was approved, I traveled to Brazil, one of the leading countries in the production and consumption of bioethanol. There I visited areas where they plant sugar cane to produce ethanol, I met the process for its production and I could also verify that at all service stations users can buy ethanol or gasoline, because cars use both fuels indistinctly.
17 years away Brazil still has its relevant role and Mexico is still stagnant in the production of biofuels.
To produce ethanol, sugar or corn and sugarcane starch can be used, as well as other crops such as beets, barley, jatropha, sorghum fig, sunflower, among others, but after approved the law realized that bioethanol production could put food security at risk because producers could give priority to the production of bioethanol.
So Pemex was ordered to execute conversions in some refining and petrochemical plants to use anhydrous ethanol as a gasoline oxygenant.
Its use as an alternate fuel would have to wait at that time and now it will surely also have to wait because the new law states the valorization of organic waste for the production of biofuels, but only “in marginal soils that do not come from primary supplies of plant origin destined for human consumption, except those from surpluses of sugar and sorghum cane surpluses”.
It establishes to develop and promote mechanisms to encourage the direct use of biomass such as fuel, production, import, export, storage, transport, distribution and sale to the public of biofuels to respond to the need to find more clean and efficient energy sources, especially to operate in sectors such as transport, electricity and heating.
Through the then Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock, Rural Development, Fisheries and Food (Sagarpa) and private participation was allocated more than 500 million pesos for the impulse of crops such as oil palm, jatropha, hygiert and sugar cane for biofuel production.
After all those years only seven biodiesel and bioethanol production plants were installed. Six companies signed supply contracts with PEMEX but some had problems complying with them and, while, the need to reduce the dependence on fossil fuels and reduce greenhouse gas emissions, remains latent.
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