Matt Johnston et al 2009 Environ. Res. Lett. 4 014004 doi:10.1088/1748-9326/4/1/014004
Matt Johnston1, Jonathan A Foley2, Tracey Holloway1, Chris Kucharik1 and Chad Monfreda3
Show affiliationsAggressive 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.
Issue 1 (January-March 2009)
Received 18 July 2008, accepted for publication 12 December 2008
Published 13 January 2009
A Corrigendum for this article has been published in 2009 Environ. Res. Lett. 4 019801
Matt Johnston et al 2009 Environ. Res. Lett. 4 014004
G. Bélanger et al JHEP11(2009)026
Vinay L. Kashyap et al. 2002 ApJ 580 1118
Chao Li et al 2008 J. Phys. D: Appl. Phys. 41 032005
Adam L. Kraus et al. 2007 The Astronomical Journal 134 1488
Ramon Lapiedra et al 2007 J. Phys.: Conf. Ser. 66 012018
Sutirtha Mukhopadhyay et al 2009 New J. Phys. 11 055002
Edwin A. Bergin et al 2002 ApJ 570 L101
T G Blaney and D J E Knight 1973 J. Phys. D: Appl. Phys. 6 936
Aaron C. Boley et al 2009 ApJ 706 L192