Brazil increases energy production

Official Name: Federative Republic of Brazil.

Summary: With extensive natural resources, a large population, and a growing economy, Brazil relies on its diverse geography and resources to meet its energy needs.

Brazil has made huge strides toward becoming one of the world’s leading energy producers and exporters, with pronounced advantages in both hydropower and oil exploration and refining, and demonstrated economic leadership in its development of the biomass and ethanol sectors.

To understand Brazil’s energy production and energy consumption, it is critical to understand Brazil’s unique geography. As of 2024, Brazil was the world’s seventh-most populous country, with approximately 220 million residents and a landmass of nearly 3.3 million square miles. Brazil was also the fifth-largest country by area in the world, and home to South America’s largest economy. Most of the residents lived on Brazil’s southeastern coast, where major cities such as Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo are located.

For South America, Brazil has relatively few mountains compared to its western neighbors, such as Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, and Bolivia, which host the Andes Mountains. However, Brazil does have vast sources of freshwater, including the Amazon River, the second-longest river in the world, which carries approximately one-fifth of the world’s freshwater. Brazil’s portion of the Amazon rain forest is the largest contiguous rain forest in the entire world. With a large industrial and agricultural sector, Brazil is the world’s leading producer of many agricultural products, including sugarcane and coffee; it boasts the world’s biggest herd of commercial cattle and the world’s second-largest production of soybeans.

Hydropower

Brazil’s energy production is primarily for electricity generation and transportation fuels. With such extensive river systems, it is no surprise that Brazil’s main source of electricity generation is hydropower. Brazil’s largest rivers primarily flow west to east (the Amazon River) and north to south (the Paraná River); thus, energy is transferred from the kinetic energy of the river flows to electrical energy on Brazil’s east coast. According to US Energy Information Administration data for 2023, approximately 54.8 percent of Brazil’s electricity generation came from hydroelectric facilities in 2021.

Brazil’s largest—and the world’s second-largest—hydroelectric facility (the largest being the Three Gorges Dam in China) is the Itaipu Dam on the Paraná River. In 2020, the Itaipu facility alone, which is jointly managed by Brazil and Paraguay, generated 2.77 billion megawatt-hours of electricity.

The Paraná River watershed, joined with that of the Paraguay River, drains parts of Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Brazil. The Paraná and Paraguay are ecologically and economically important, providing both water and energy to São Paulo, as well as freshening the Pantanal, one of the world’s largest wetlands, and the mammoth Iguaçú Falls on the Brazilian–Argentine border.

In addition to the Itaipu facility, Brazil’s second-largest (and the world’s fourth-largest) hydroelectric facility is the Tucuruí Dam on the Tocantins River in the state of Pará. The dam was completed in 1984 and has a total generating capacity of 8,370 megawatts. Brazil is also constructing the Belo Monte hydroelectric facility on the Xingu River in Pará. Upon completion, it will be the third-largest hydroelectric plant in the world, behind China’s Three Gorges Dam and Brazil’s Itaipu facility.

Despite providing the majority of Brazil’s electricity, some of these hydroelectric facilities in Brazil have been controversial, as they have resulted in the displacement of local communities (as has happened with the Belo Monte facility), and because they are located far from major cities there are high transmission and distribution losses. Furthermore, during periods of below-average rainfall, Brazil’s hydropower suffers. According to the World Wildlife Fund, Brazil has experienced three extreme droughts in the twenty-first century.

Conventional Thermal Generation

The second-largest source of electricity for Brazil is via conventional thermal generation. Within this category, approximately 8 percent was generated with biomass in 2021. Natural gas was the second most important resource within the thermal sector, producing approximately 15 percent of the nation's electricity. As a leading agricultural producer, with massive sugarcane cultivation and vast tracts of forest, Brazil is well positioned to expand this sector. Brazil also has numerous gas turbine and combined-cycle power plants, located throughout the country.

Brazil’s government has in recent years expanded its Luz para Todos (“Light for All”) program aimed at delivering electricity to more of its rural households. An estimated 3.2 million families, or 15.3 million people, were brought into the program since its inception in 2003 to its complettion in 2018. Brazil’s largest electric utility, the government-held Electrobras, operated Luz para Todos in partnership with various state and local energy companies and cooperatives.

Brazil has one of the world’s largest uranium reserves, with deposits found mainly in the eastern region of the country, and uses this domestic supply to fuel its nuclear power sector—which, however, remains quite limited. The country has just one nuclear power station, Angra Nuclear Power Plant, sited at the Central Nuclear Almirante Álvaro Alberto facility, on Itaorna Beach in Rio de Janeiro. This power plant consists of two reactors: Angra 1, with total generating capacity of 657 megawatts, and Angra 2 facility, rated at 1,405 megawatts. Construction of a third unit, designed to generate 1,245 megawatts, began in 1984, halted two years later, and started up again in 2010.  As of 2024, the nation was hopeful that the reactor would become operational by the 2030s.

Nonhydroelectric

Alongside hydroelectricity and biomass thermal generation, Brazil is expanding into other renewable energy sources, especially wind power. In fact, according to IHS Emerging Energy Research, Brazil will lead all of South America with 46 gigawatts of total installed wind capacity for electricity generation by the late 2020s.

Brazil and the United States have several green energy cooperation agreements, including one to collaborate on hydrogen fuel cells and related hydrogen technology development, and an omnibus agreement covering anti-pollution measures, electricity deregulation, and on the anti-greenhouse gas front, work on carbon sequestration.

Energy for Transportation

Oil, along with ethanol, is primarily used for transportation fuels, while hydropower is primarily used for the generation of electricity in Brazil. During 2021, approximately 9.1 percent of Brazil’s total energy consumption was generated from hydropower (as opposed to 54.8 percent of total electricity production from hydropower), while the majority of Brazil’s total energy consumption was generated from oil. The transportation sector, as opposed to the electricity generation sector, is far more dependent on oil and petroleum products.

Over the first decades of the 21st century, Brazil has increased its oil production capability and is now producing more petroleum than its domestic consumption, thus becoming a net exporter. According to the US Energy Information Administration, Brazil had 13.24 billion barrels of proven oil reserves in 2021, second only to Venezuela among South American nations. Much of Brazil’s proven reserves reside offshore in the Campos and Santos Basins.

The giant energy corporation Petrobras, owned by the government but famous for its $70 billion public share offering in 2010, owns most of the refining facilities in the country. Founded in 1953, Petrobras today is one of the largest companies in the world by market capitalization. The company’s exploration arm has announced several milestone “mega-field” undersea oil discoveries in the past decade—although skepticism by industry analysts has arisen in light of Petrobras releasing little hard data on the strikes.

Brazil is the second-largest producer of ethanol, after the United States, and the world’s largest exporter of ethanol. Much is used in Brazil’s domestic transportation sector to complement gasoline consumption. Of note, the development of ethanol from sugarcane, the main ethanol source in Brazil, is generally more efficient than distilling the fuel from corn, which is the most common approach in the United States.

Energy Consumption

With total energy consumption in 2022 estimated at 10.77 quadrillion British thermal units (Btu), Brazil is among the top-10 energy consumers in the world and third-largest (after the United States and Canada) in the Western Hemisphere. Brazil’s five largest cities and largest consumers of energy are São Paulo (with a population of more than 22.6 million), Rio de Janeiro (more than 6.2 million), Belo Horizonte (4.9 million), and the capital, Brasília (about 4.3 million).

According to the International Energy Agency, Brazil’s final electricity consumption was mainly by the industrial sector, followed by commercial and public services, and the residential sector.

Bibliography

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"Brazil." US International Energy Agency, 2024, www.iea.org/countries/brazil. Accessed 31 July 2024.

"Brazil." US Energy Information Administration, 4 Dec. 2023, www.eia.gov/international/analysis/country/BRA. Accessed 31 July 2024.

Ritchie, Hannah, and Max Roser. "Brazil: Energy Country Profile." Our World in Data, 2024, ourworldindata.org/energy/country/brazil. Accessed 31 July 2024.

"World’s Biggest Hydroelectric Power Plants." Power Technology, 5 Mar. 2021, www.power-technology.com/features/worlds-biggest-hydroelectric-power-plants/?cf-view. Accessed 31 July 2024.