|
Energy production in Brazil is sufficient to meet demand until 2009, the executive secretary of the Ministry of Mining and Energy, Maurício Tolmasquim guaranteed, earlier this month.
"Through 2009 there is sufficient supply to meet demand, and beginning in 2010 there will be new sources of supply as a result of the bidding procedures that are going to be held to decide on new power plant construction," he pointed out.
The secretary was in São Paulo to participate in the 14th Forum of Debates - Project Brazil, which is discussing the situation of the Brazilian Energy Matrix.
He used the occasion to congratulate the President of Bolivia, Carlos Mesa, for his declarations assuring that the contract to supply gas to Brazil will be fulfilled.
Brazil can gain a route to ship its products via the Pacific Ocean in, at most, five years, with the construction of four hydroelectric plants along the Madeira River.
The plants' reservoirs will form a network of waterways with a 4.2 thousand kilometer perimeter between Brazil and Bolivia.
Last September, two companies, the Furnas Centrais Elétricas and Norberto Odebrecht, submitted to the National Electric Energy Agency (Aneel) a viability study of the Jirau power plant, which will be built 130 kilometers from Porto Velho, capital of the state of Rondônia, in the Northern region of Brazil.
They have also submitted a viability study of the Santo Antônio power plant, which will be located six kilometers from Porto Velho.
Together, the Jirau and Santo Antônio plants will have the potential to generate 6.3 thousand megawatts (MW) of electric energy, enough to eliminate the dependence of the states of Rondônia and Acre on thermally produced electricity.
The two states' energy matrix is predominately based on diesel, which is more expensive and dirty. "This corresponds to at least 8% of Brazil's installed capacity, which amounts to 80 thousand MW," explained Marcio Arantes, an engineer in Furnas's Superintendency of Generation Enterprises.
The forecast for the start of construction is June, 2006. "Jirau will begin to generate energy three and a half years after work gets underway, and Santo Antônio, after four and a half years," Arantes affirmed. Construction is expected to take between eight and ten years.
Furnas and the Odebrecht construction company are awaiting authorization to initiate inventory and viability studies of the two other power plants that will comprise the Madeira River complex.
One of them will be the second binational power plant with Brazilian participation. The project has its location set for the municipality of Guajará Mirim, in Rondônia, on the Bolivian border.
The other plant will be built in Bolivian territory, in Cachuera Esperanza. Studies indicate that the Guajará plant will be able to generate 3000 MW and the Bolivian plant, something on the order of 600 MW.
With the creation of the waterway network, the soybean production of Brazil's Center-West region, for example, will be able to be shipped through Peru, Bolivia's western neighbor.
"This would bring a reduction of 3.5 thousand nautical miles, corresponding to the detour made to ship soybeans to Asian markets, [as the shipments are] generally embarked in the ports of Santos or Paranaguá and go south by way of Tierra del Fuego or north by way of the Panama Canal," Arantes observed.
Another advantage of the waterway network, as José Bonifácio Pinto Júnior, Odebrecht's contracts director, remarked, is the relief that it will provide to the country's highway network in the Southeast, Center-West, and South, responsible for transporting a large part of Brazil's industrial and agricultural production for export.
ABr
 |
Subscribe to this comment's feed
The small, coastal town of Condé is located just a twenty minute's drive from João Pessoa, the capital of Paraíba. The Northeast of Brazil has historically been a place of encounter and mixing between peoples. For millenia groups of indigenous people fished, farmed, migrated and sometimes fought along this large, fertile area. 
The Brazilian diplo-MÁ-cia (bad diplomacy) carries on its accelerated course towards the non-acknowledgment of human rights, although sometimes it takes pleasure in saying that it does precisely the opposite. The visit of Iran's president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is another example of a diplomatic omission that verges on hypocrisy. 
On July 4, 2006, representatives of Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay met in Caracas to sign the protocol for the entrance of Venezuela into the Southern Common Market (Mercosur). After two and a half years, the protocol was approved by the legislative bodies of Argentina and Uruguay, and as of now it may be only days away from being ratified by the continent's economic megalith, Brazil. 
Some sectors of the fight against AIDS have suggested that Thabo Mbeki, the former president of South Africa, committed genocide through his absence from the fight against the illness in his country throughout his two terms. 
One hundred and eleven years after Brazil abolished slavery, the number of workers deprived of their freedom is still huge. They raise cattle, produce charcoal, sugar cane or timber. Some of them, most undocumented Bolivians, work in basements of small apparel factories in São Paulo and other metropolis. 
On November 7, 2009 a few friends and I had an opportunity to take a look inside a Brazilian jail outside the city of Rio de Janeiro. We were able to take some amateur footage of our experience on video (see link below). It's no surprise, of course, that the typical Brazilian jail lacks some of the functionality of those in North America or Europe, but our experience that day was quite shocking. 
Depletion of the Amazon Rainforest is not a new concern facing environmentalists, biologists, ecologists, and a growing number of the Amazonian indigenous peoples. For decades they have feared for the fate of the world's most biologically diverse and species-rich hothouse. 
Geisy Arruda made history this week in Brazil, but for all the wrong reasons. What began as a poorly planned fashion statement has become a worldwide tale. Geisy decided to wear a pink mini-dress to her private college in São Paulo state, and after that, all hell broke loose. 
The push of vigilante groups in Rio de Janeiro's favelas (shantytowns) in the last three years is the most important and alarming information of the just-released study by the Rio de Janeiro University's Violence Research Center (Nupev-Uerj). 
A dispute over drug trafficking territory in Rio de Janeiro has intensified lately, leaving in its wake unprecedented acts of violence, such as the downing of a police helicopter in the northern zone of the city on October 17. Three policemen died and another two were injured. This event has drawn the attention of the international media, who are raising the issue of public security for the 2016 Olympics to be held in Rio.