Agriculture - Sustainable biofuels Redux
- W.K. Kellogg Biological Station and Great Lakes Bioenergy Research
- ORNL
- Purdue University
- Brown University
- University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
- Colorado State University, Fort Collins
Last May's passage of the 2008 Farm Bill raises the stakes for biofuel sustainability: A substantial subsidy for the production of cellulosic ethanol starts the United States again down a path with uncertain environmental consequences. This time, however, the subsidy is for both the refiners ($1.01 per gallon) and the growers ($45 per ton of biomass), which will rapidly accelerate adoption and place hard-to-manage pressures on efforts to design and implement sustainable production practices - as will a 2007 legislative mandate for 16 billion gallons of cellulosic ethanol per year by 2022. Similar directives elsewhere, e.g., the European Union's mandate that 10% of all transport fuel in Europe be from renewable sources by 2020, make this a global issue. The European Union's current reconsideration of this target places even more emphasis on cellulosic feedstocks (1). The need for knowledge- and science-based policy is urgent. Biofuel sustainability has environmental, economic, and social facets that all interconnect. Tradeoffs among them vary widely by types of fuels and where they are grown and, thus, need to be explicitly considered by using a framework that allows the outcomes of alternative systems to be consistently evaluated and compared. A cellulosic biofuels industry could have many positive social and environmental attributes, but it could also suffer from many of the sustainability issues that hobble grain-based biofuels, if not implemented the right way.
- Research Organization:
- Oak Ridge National Lab. (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States). Oak Ridge National Environmental Research Park
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE
- DOE Contract Number:
- DE-AC05-00OR22725
- OSTI ID:
- 1014266
- Journal Information:
- Science, Vol. 322, Issue 5898; ISSN 0036--8075
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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