Can biofuels mitigate the emissions from oil used for transport?

IEA report: Can biofuels mitigate the emissions from oil used for transport?

The Paris-based International Energy Agency (IEA) projects that the worldwide use of oil in transport could almost double between 2000 and 2030, greatly increasing greenhouse gas emissions. Biofuels could help reduce this, the IEA says, because they represent an important low-greenhouse-gas alternative to petroleum over this timescale.

Projections by the IEA suggest that biofuels, such as ethanol, biodiesel and other fuels derived from biomass could offer "an important low-greenhouse-gas alternative to petroleum" for automotive fuel use up until 2030.

Otherwise, the IEA warns, if governments do not take action, global use of hydrocarbons for automotive use could "nearly double between 2000 and 2030", with a proportional increase in greenhouse gas emissions.

Fully implemented

The IEA authors discern "a clear trend " globally towards the displacement of petroleum as an automotive fuel over the next few decades by biofuels, including ethanol, biodiesel, and several other liquid and gaseous fuels.

This is the conclusion of a recent IEA report published in February 2005, Biofuels for Transport: An International Perspective. It examines the latest trends in biofuel production and considers how the future could look if recent initiatives in IEA countries and around the world were fully implemented.

The IEA authors discern "a clear trend " globally towards the displacement of petroleum as an automotive fuel over the next few decades by biofuels, including ethanol, biodiesel, and several other liquid and gaseous fuels. The report predicts that recent policy initiatives, if fully implemented, could result in up to a 5% displacement of motor gasoline use with biofuel (mainly ethanol) worldwide by 2010.

Many IEA countries, including the US, Canada, several European countries (and the European Union), Australia and Japan, are considering or have already adopted policies that could result in much higher biofuels use over the next decade.

Benefits

Ethanol and biodiesel provide significant reductions in greenhouse gas emissions compared with gasoline and diesel fuel on a "well-to-wheels" basis. Especially large reductions are achievable from ethanol produced from sugar cane and from cellulosic feedstocks.

Biofuels can also provide air quality benefits when used either as pure, unblended fuels or, more commonly, when blended with petroleum fuels. Benefits from ethanol and biodiesel blending into petroleum fuels include lower emissions of carbon monoxide (CO), sulfur dioxide (SO2) and particulate matter. The report says this occurs particularly when emissions control systems are poor, such as in some developing countries.

Biofuels are generally less toxic than conventional petroleum fuels and in some cases they can reduce wastes through recycling - in particular agricultural wastes from cropland and waste oils and grease that can be converted to biodiesel. However, the use of biofuels can also lead to increases in some categories of emissions, such as evaporative hydrocarbon emissions and aldehyde emissions from the use of ethanol.

Ethanol has a very high octane number and can be used to increase the octane of gasoline. It has not traditionally been the first choice for octane enhancement because of its relatively high cost, but with other options (such as MTBE, methyl- tertiary-butyl-ether) increasingly out of favor, demand for ethanol for this purpose and as an oxygenate is on the rise.

In IEA countries, the production cost of ethanol and biodiesel can be up to three times that of gasoline and diesel. Production costs have dropped somewhat over the past decade and the report forecasts that they will probably continue to drop, albeit slowly, in the future. Nevertheless the IEA does not consider it likely that biofuels produced from grain and oil-seed feedstock using conventional conversion processes will compete with gasoline and diesel, "unless world oil prices rise considerably".

The report says that technologies are relatively mature and cost-reductions are ultimately limited by the fairly high feedstock (crop) costs. "However, the use of lower-cost cellulosic feedstock with advanced conversion technologies could eventually lead to the production of much lower-cost ethanol in the IEA countries," it suggests.

Over the next decade the costs of producing cellulosic ethanol may drop considerably, bringing cost per tonne down to $100 or even $50. Ethanol produced today in Brazil, with an incremental cost of $0.03 to $0.13 per gasoline-equivalent liter (i.e. adjusting for the lower energy content of ethanol) and very high well-to-wheels GHG reductions per liter, already provides reductions at a cost of $20 to $60 per tonne, by far the lowest-cost biofuels option.

Ethanol from grain in IEA countries currently costs $250 or more per tonne of CO2-equivalent greenhouse gas emissions. In contrast, if large-scale plants using advanced conversion processes were constructed today, ethanol from cellulosic feedstocks would cost more per liter, but would provide greenhouse gas reductions at a lower cost per tonne (around $200).

This article was first published in Platts Energy Economist

Created: Apr 28, 2005

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