Description
From a political economy perspective, upon the rising international efforts for sustainable energy transitions, this paper seeks to assess Brazil’s prospective leadership in SAF production and its structural constraints that may condition its development. These include the country’s commodity dependence, technological gaps, and loose public–private coordination.
Amongst SAF’s technological routes certified by CORSIA, HEFA, AtJ and FT stand out as the most adequate for the Brazilian setting. Given its wide range of suitable raw materials, but incipient technological capacity, routes that demand less high-tech maturity appear as more viable. Nonetheless, Brazil’s potential leadership should not be predicated merely on its natural resource endowments. Rather, it should derive from local knowledge accumulation and technological innovation.
Therefore, three primary conditions are required to upgrade Brazil’s position within the global SAF value chain. First, it is essential to ensure access to high demand markets. A second barrier lies in Brazilian companies’ limited access to knowledge and specific technologies. This limitation connects to our third driver: international firms, as well as institutional and governmental cooperation. Methodology here deals with a case study to measure costs and competitiveness of a sample of our three SAF routes. We also conduct a questionnaire with current or potential actors. The preliminary data analysis is upon a structuralist model linking the global value chain to our three key drivers within the international political economy framework.
We emphasize two main results. First, a diagnostic analysis highlights the significant role of foreign equipment. Interestingly, qualified workers are crucial to integrate the equipment efficiently and manage the challenges posed by locally specific feedstocks. Second, we identify what can be described as an international political economy trap. In this case, international cooperation tends to focus either on Brazil’s exports of primary-based SAF or on the export of intermediate products from capital-intensive SAF routes.
