Pushkin. In twenty eleven, Bruce Rastetter headed down to Brazil. He was not just another Midwest tourist headed to the Amazon. Bruce had pioneered factory farming in Iowa and then done the same for biofuels in this thing called carbon capture. He's a big Republican donor too, so he went to Brazil looking for land.
So we met with a lot of larger farmers, went from Bahia to Tokatines to Mannagros.
And he flew down with a team of executives. They said they were going to help the country get in on a gold rush.
Carbon and its derivatives are going to be really the next great commodity that the globe is in to trade.
It's a huge opportunity, but we won't qualify unless we lower carbon asasity scores.
Over the last couple of decades, climate regulators have worked hard to incentivize green energy solutions, and Bruce rest Etter knows better than anyone how to take advantage of something like that. He's gotten huge government kickbacks by pivoting from growing corn to making corn ethanol, and now he's helping the ethanol industry get paid for capturing their carbon emissions.
So this Republican king maker is planning on this get rich scheme of US paying him to capture CO two at ethanol plants and then shipping it across private land and public land and then disposing of it somewhere many states away.
For the last ten years, Bruce and his Brazilian company FSBO Energia have been pushing corn ethanol and carbon capture in Brazil, even helping to raft Brazilian regulations around it. This fs is promoting regulations, pioneering, prospecting, and even drawing on the experience of its partners in the United States. Now, corn ethanol production and carbon capture are so big in Brazil they're the top competitor to the US. But trouble back home is threatening to topple Bruce's whole carbon empire.
Because here's the thing. Corn ethanol has never been a climate solution, and the idea of capturing carbon it's kind of a joke.
It's a waste stream first and foremost, and any policies that incentivize it's uptake and use risk incentivizing an increase in its production.
Once that carbon gets captured, oil companies send most of it underground to extract even more oil so we can burn even more fossil fuels and create more emissions. They get paid to get the CO two. They earn a profit and getting CO two on the ground, and then they can use it to you to get well out of the ground and earn a prophet on the oil too. By the time Bruce got to Brazil, the people of
Iowa were on to him. The rank and file folks on the ground in the Midwest's one big scam, and the love of every bone also on the ground.
And I also think it's a scam.
Today, Bruce and the world are at a tipping point. Will carbon be a commodity traded on the markets, divorced entirely from its role as a pollutant? Or will we choose a different path? Welcome to Season fifteen of Drilled Carbon Cowboys, the story of the ethanol kingpin of Iowa who became the king of corn in Brazil, and what it tells us about the limits of technology and markets to solve the climate crisis. This season is a collaboration between Drilled and the Intercept Brazil. You can get the
Portuguese version over on the Intercept Brazil's feed. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.