São Paulo launches first sugarcane ethanol carbon capture plant plan

On June 10, São Paulo signed a R$30 million plan for Brazil’s first sugarcane ethanol carbon-capture plant, linking the project to a new research center at USP.

Governor Tarcísio de Freitas announced the plan during an Environment Week event, when the Secretariat of Environment, Infrastructure and Logistics, Fapesp and the Polytechnic School of the University of São Paulo formalized the Center for Technologies for Capture and Storage of Biogenic Carbon, CTCCSBio. The Fapesp-funded Science Center for Development will be based at Poli-USP and work with Semil, Petrobras, the São Martinho Group and Rolim Goulart Cardoso Advogados. Its mandate is to study whether the plant can be built and how it would be implemented in São Paulo’s sugar-energy sector.

Bruno Souza Carmo, a Poli-USP professor and CTCCSBio director, sees the technology itself as already existing, but making it economically viable in São Paulo as the hard part. The center will also examine monetization routes such as carbon markets, environmental offsets and incentive policies, because storage does not create direct revenue on its own.

On November 17, 2025, the Ministry of Mines and Energy opened a public consultation on a draft decree that would set technical, environmental and operational rules for CCS, CCUS and BECCS, including monitoring, traceability, transparency and legal responsibility. The Energy Research Office places sugarcane and corn ethanol among Brazil’s strongest BECCS candidates because they generate high-purity CO2 streams, but the technology has to be judged on a full life-cycle basis, with emissions and removals counted together.

On December 9, 2025, BNDES approved R$384.3 million for FS Indústria de Biocombustíveis Ltda. to build a unit in Lucas do Rio Verde, Mato Grosso, that will compress, inject and permanently store CO2 from corn ethanol in deep saline reservoirs of the Parecis Basin. The project is set to remove about 423,000 tonnes of CO2 a year from plant emissions. A 2023 academic review found Brazil’s technical base for BECCS is favorable, but economics and CO2 transport costs remain the main barriers, especially outside the Southeast.