Drought-tolerant Biofuel Crops could be a Critical Hedge for Biorefineries
- Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)
- Northwestern Univ., Evanston, IL (United States)
Numerous researchers and policymakers have raised concerns over the adverse effects that growing bioenergy crops on prime agricultural land has on food prices, carbon balances, water demand and environmental health. Biofuel policies such as the California Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS) and the second US Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS2) already regulate biofuels for carbon emissions that occur due to indirect land use change. Biofuel producers can address these concerns and sidestep steep penalties for indirect land use change if they grow biofuel crops on land that has little or no economic value. The focus of most biofuel research over the last decade has been the development of biofuels from cellulosic feedstocks. It has been argued that deriving biofuels from non-food biomass, like switchgrass, and growing the crop on low value land would minimize competition with food production. Moreover, using non-irrigated rain-fed feedstocks can substantially reduce the lifecycle footprint of cellulosic biofuels. This has motivated scientists to study if biofuel crops can be genetically engineered to thrive on low-value, marginal lands. One example is the development of switchgrass genomics designed to enhance productivity. For a biofuel business, investing in the development of a product in expectation of a specific policy regime (i.e. the regulation of land use in fuel policy) is fraught with risk. While we believe that all fuel policies worldwide should reward biofuel crops grown on land that has little or no potential for growing food crops, there is good reason to believe that such globally coordinated policy on the subject of land use is unlikely. Hence, in this article, we assess the economic benefits of drought-tolerant switchgrass that may accrue to biofuel businesses independent of any incentives for the use of marginal land. The frequency of extreme weather and drought has increased in the U.S. over the last decade. While some researchers estimate that droughts are decreasing in severity and duration, most climate scientists report that advancing climate change is expected to worsen droughts throughout the U.S., especially in the Midwest, which is the nation’s largest producer of food crops. Scientists are increasingly convinced that climate change is leading to warmer extremes including severity of precipitation extremes. In the more likely scenario of worsening drought, we find that drought-tolerance of the cellulosic crop is critical for the biofuel industry to remain competitive, irrespective of whether the crop is grown on marginal or prime agricultural land. In other words, we find that over the lifetime of a typical biorefinery, there could be one or more years when a crop is likely to be severely diminished due to drought conditions, thereby driving cellulosic ethanol prices substantially higher than would otherwise be the case.
- Research Organization:
- Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Science (SC); USDOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), Energy Efficiency Office. Advanced Materials & Manufacturing Technologies Office (AMMTO)
- DOE Contract Number:
- AC02-05CH11231
- OSTI ID:
- 1209356
- Report Number(s):
- LBNL--5537E
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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