Abstract
Biofuel production is dependent upon agriculture and forestry systems, and the expectations of future biofuel potential are high. A study of the global food production and biofuel production from edible crops implies that biofuel produced from edible parts of crops lead to a global deficit of food. This is rather well known, which is why there is a strong urge to develop biofuel systems that make use of residues or products from forest to eliminate competition with food production. However, biofuel from agro-residues still depend upon the crop production system, and there are many parameters to deal with in order to investigate the sustainability of biofuel production. There is a theoretical limit to how much biofuel can be achieved globally from agro-residues and this amounts to approximately one third of todays’ use of fossil fuels in the transport sector. In reality this theoretical potential may be eliminated by the energy use in the biomass-conversion technologies and production systems, depending on what type of assessment method is used. By surveying existing studies on biofuel conversion the theoretical limit of biofuels from 2010 years’ agricultural production was found to be either non-existent due to energy consumption in the conversion process, or up to 2–6000TWh (biogas from residues and waste and ethanol from woody biomass) in the more optimistic cases.
Highlights
From a technological point of view biofuels are excellent for replacing fossil fuels, especially in the transport sector; most of the fuel types can be produced in liquid form and has energy densities close to its fossil fuels equivalents
Biofuel from agro-residues still depend upon the crop production system, and there are many parameters to deal with in order to investigate the sustainability of biofuel production
There is a theoretical limit to how much biofuel can be achieved globally from agro-residues and this amounts to approximately one third of todays’ use of fossil fuels in the transport sector
Summary
The main objective of this paper is to present limiting factors to biofuel production and reasonable expectations on biofuel from agricultural products, in a global context. Revealed that the calculated environmental performance is affected considerably by the methodology chosen”, and achieved a negative energy balance while using attributional LCA compared to an energy return of 5–10 times using consequencial LCA (see [70] for definitions) It cannot be thoroughly understood from existing literature whether there will be an energy gain from converting residues and waste-products into biogas of second generation fuel. The theoretical limit of biofuels from 2010 years’ agricultural system is either non-existent due to energy consumption in the conversion process, or up to 2–6000 TWh (biogas from residues and waste and ethanol from woody biomass) in the more optimistic cases
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