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With much of its locomotive fleet nearly four decades old, Nigeria is eager to inject new technologies into its rail system as it embarks on widespread upgrades to its passenger and freight lines. As we reported in May, GE recently signed an agreement with the government of Nigeria that aims to throw open the door to a host of collaborations in transportation, oil and gas processing, electric power generation, water treatment, healthcare, aviation and integrated safety and security systems. As part of that goal, today the first of five GE locomotives arrived in the country — with 20 more slated for delivery later this year.

Rail good news! The Model C25 six-axle locomotives were designed specifically to accommodate Nigeria’s weight per axle and clearance characteristics. Locomotives similar to the C25 are already successfully hauling freight in South Africa. Approximately 17,000 GE locomotives are in use in more than 50 countries around the world.

A drive for cleaner energy is revving up in Brazil. In the Amazon, an ambitious project aimed at replacing power plants running on heavy fuel-oil with new, cleaner-burning natural gas engines from GE’s ecomagination line of more energy efficient technologies is underway. While near the eastern coast, two new power projects will mark the debut of GE’s wind turbines in the country.

Brazil’s federal energy company, Petrobras, is using sugarcane-based ethanol in a gas turbine system to produce electricity on a full commercial scale — the world’s first such project. They marked the occasion with a celebration today at the plant, which uses two GE gas turbines — one of whose combustors has been modified by GE to enable the use of ethanol.

With the demand for sugar-based ethanol fuel soaring, the world’s largest grower and processor of sugarcane — Brazil-based Cosan — has inked a deal with GE Transportation for 50 new freight locomotives. The deal marks a win for GE’s growing presence in the critically important country — and it underscores how open markets continue to benefit North America in terms of jobs and new business as the engines will be made at GE’s Grove City, Pennsylvania plant and the locomotives will be built by GE Transportation South America, our affiliate plant in Contagem, Brazil.

Azul, the new low-cost carrier that David Neeleman, founder and former-CEO of JetBlue just launched last year in Brazil, has signed a 15-year, $1 billion deal with GE Aviation to service the engines on its fleet of regional planes. Azul’s execs say the move frees them to focus all of their attention on operations, customers and growth — which is explosive at the moment. As The Wall Street Journal notes in its recent story on the emergence of new carriers in Brazil, “smaller airlines have raised their collective market share of Brazil’s $6.5 billion domestic aviation market to 14% from 8% over the past year.”