The Department of Agriculture (DA) is working with the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corp. to transfer locally Brazil’s expertise in livestock bio-energy and bio-power.

DA-attached Philippine Agribusiness Development Corp. (PADC) has started liaison with the Brazilian research center as the Philippines also wants to harness potentially significant energy resource from livestock waste that can generate biogas or electricity from methane capture.

"We are working on a memorandum of agreement on an exchange of technology in bioenergy with Embrapa," said PADC President Marriz Agbon in an interview.

The research center is also called Empresa Brasileira de Pesquisa Agropecuaria (Embrapa) which has expertise in bioenergy even as Brazil is now a world leader in innovative and environment-friendly fuel technologies, mainly sugarcane-based ethanol.

Technologies in Brazil also include production of ethanol from bagasse, a sugar milling waste, that can also be used for co-generation.

PADC has started looking at this partnership since the International Conference on Biofuel last Nov. 17 in Sao Paolo, Brazil which Agbon attended.

Other research groups which PADC is tying up with are the Center for Sugarcane Technology and the Brazilian Sugarcane Industry Association.

The government finds it advantageous to collaborate on technology transfer with Brazil since Brazil has also become a leader in Flexifuel cars which is a dual-fuel vehicle that can use an alternative fuel with its internal combustion engine that can run on say gasoline blended with ethanol or methanol fuel.

"Brazilian car manufacturers already produced 20 million Flexifuel cars from 2002 to 2008. There is no black smoke or the smell of pollution in the streets of Sao Paolo because of Flexifuel cars," said Agbon.

AGbon said the environment for investments in bioenergy in the Philippines has become attractive to investors with the passage of the Renewable Energy Law. This specially becomes true since independent producers or end-consumers of power have incentives to sell their excess power to the grid .