Buenos Bios

How South American biofuels are gaining steam, and why that freaks the U.S. out

In his drab office in the fashion-obsessed chaos of downtown Buenos Aires, Argentina, Edmundo Defferrari cuts a farmhand’s figure in a corporate man’s world.

The 28-year-old industrial engineer, in cap, jeans, and scruffy beard, taps through a PowerPoint presentation choked with graphs, statistics, and cartoon renderings of how his prototype biodiesel plant can help farmers become self-sufficient. Then he opens a dark brown bottle filled with soybean diesel. “When it burns,” he says, “it smells like there’s a McDonald’s in the field.”
Backed by Don Mario, an Argentine seed company, Defferrari has developed what he hopes is a bit of methadone for global oil addiction: a localized way for soybean farmers to turn part of their harvest into homespun fuel. And this entrepreneur is far from alone. Kick-started by high oil prices and talk of peak oil, South America is making an incipient push to reshape the future of fuel.

It’s not an easy task. “International financial institutions, from the International Monetary Fund to the Inter-American Development Bank, have loaned with a favorable bias upon extractive industries, and little effort on renewables,” says Mark Langevin, a politics professor at Chapman University in Santa Maria, Calif., whose work focuses on Brazil. Observers also say that politics and economies of scale currently mean more noise than payoffs for the South American biofuel industry.

Grist