Resetting global expectations from agricultural biofuels

Abstract

Aggressive renewable energy policies have helped the biofuels industry grow at a rate few could have predicted. However, while discourse on the energy balance and environmental impacts of agricultural biofuel feedstocks are common, the potential they hold for additional production has received considerably less attention. Here we present a new biofuel yield analysis based on the best available global agricultural census data. These new data give us the first opportunity to consider geographically-specific patterns of biofuel feedstock production in different regions, across global, continental, national and sub-national scales. Compared to earlier biofuel yield tables, our global results show overestimates of biofuel yields by ∼100% or more for many crops. To encourage the use of regionally-specific data for future biofuel studies, we calculated complete results for 20 feedstock crops for 238 countries, states, territories and protectorates.