Ethanol: An Evaluation of its Scientific and Technological Development and Network of Players During the Period of 1995 to 2009

Ethanol is being considered worldwide as a promising fuel and the reasons are twofold: a substantial rise in the price of oil and environmental, social and geographic issues. This study aims to present a scientific and technological evaluation of ethanol development during the period of 1995-2009. The scientific data was collected and processed using statistic tools available at the Web of Science (R). Research on patents was made on Esp@cenet-the European Patent Office, and the results were processed using the Matheo Patent Analyzer program. The US and Brazil are the two largest world producers and therefore, corn and sugarcane are the most used feedstocks. There has been a significant increase in the number of scientific publications and patents since 1995. However, since 2001 this growth has skyrocketed, with an almost ten-fold increase in the number of scientific publications and a fivefold increase in the number of patents. When different raw materials for fuel ethanol production were evaluated, it was found that the greatest interest lay in the use of wood residues, corn (stover) and sugarcane (bagasse), demonstrating that there is a strong interest in second generation ethanol, i.e., cellulosic ethanol. The evaluation of patent documents showed that most of the applicants (88%) are of two kinds: biotechnology companies and companies that produce enzymes, corroborating the scientific consensus that the enzymatic hydrolysis step and the fermentation process (hexoses and pentoses) are the two bottlenecks to the development of cellulosic ethanol technology.