ORIGINAL PAPER Ethanol: An Evaluation of its Scientific and Technological Development and Network of Players During the Period of 1995 to 2009 Clarissa Cruz Perrone • Lucia Gorestin Appel • Vera Lu ´ cia Maia Lellis • Fa ´bio Mendes Ferreira • Amanda Moura de Sousa • Viridiana Santana Ferreira-Leita ˜o Received: 2 June 2010 / Accepted: 23 October 2010 Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010 Abstract 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 geo- graphic 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 Sci- ence Ò . 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 five- fold 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), demon- strating 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. Keywords Ethanol Á Sugarcane Á Corn Á Cellulose Á Sucrose and starch Introduction Approximately 80% of the ethanol produced in the world is obtained by fermentation, with the balance being synthe- sized, in general, from petroleum-derived ethylene [1]. The so called ‘‘bioethanol’’ is a fuel obtained from renewable sources of raw materials, mainly plant biomass, and is used as an additive or substitute for oil [2]. Ethanol is the most used biofuel in the world [3], with a production, in 2008, of 26.4 billion liters in the US and 20.3 billion liters in Brazil [4], countries which are responsible for 70% of the global production [5]. In 2009 the Brazilian and American pro- duction achieved 27.5 [6] and 40.1 billion liters [7], respectively. Of the total world production of ethanol, 73% is used as fuel; the remaining production is beverage eth- anol (17%) and industrial ethanol (10%) [8]. The use of ethanol in internal combustion engines has been known for many decades and has been expanding due to three main aspects: (a) its use as a substitute for gasoline derived from imported crude oil during the 1973 and 1979 oil crises; (b) its popularity as an additive when mixed with low and medium octane gasoline; (c) and, currently, for environ- mental reasons [9]. Ethanol can be used for internal combustion engines either pure or mixed with gasoline in different proportions. In Brazil, ethanol is used in its pure form or in mixtures up to 25%. Currently, there has been a new increase in ethanol consumption with the introduction of flex-fuel engines which are able to work with all ethanol, all gasoline or any mixture of both; this category represents 85% of new car sales with more than 5 million units in circulation. In C. C. Perrone Á L. G. Appel Á V. L. M. Lellis Á F. M. Ferreira Á A. M. de Sousa Á V. S. Ferreira-Leita ˜o (&) National Institute of Technology, Ministry of Science and Technology, Av. Venezuela, 82 Sala 302, Centro Rio de Janeiro, RJ CEP 20081-312, Brazil e-mail: viridiana.leitao@int.gov.br 123 Waste Biomass Valor DOI 10.1007/s12649-010-9049-z