Stimulating the use of biofuels in the European Union: Implications for climate change policy

By L. Ryan, F. Convery, Susana Ferreira. 2006

182 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The substitution of fossil fuels with biofuels has been proposed in the European Union (EU) as part of a strategy to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions from road transport, increase security of energy supply and support development of rural communities. In this paper, we focus on one of these purported benefits, the reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. The costs of subsidising the price difference between European bioethanol and petrol, and biodiesel and diesel, per tonne of CO2 emissions saved are estimated. Without including the benefits from increased security of energy supply and employment generation in rural areas, the current costs of implementing European domestic biofuel targets are high compared with other available CO2 mitigation strategies. The policy instrument of foregoing some or all of the excise duty and other taxes now applicable to transport fuels in EU15 on domestically produced biofuels, as well as the potential to import low-cost alternatives, for example, from Brazil, are addressed in this context.

Subfields: Automotive Engineering, Environmental Engineering, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3668beb6c758fb9f9605813ded44783233867835

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Citations in the corpus

How should barriers to alternative fuels and vehicles be classified and potential policies to promote innovative technologies be evaluated (2012, background): “Ryan et al. (2006) compared the cost of various bioethanol and biodiesel fuels and found that the only biofuel that was cheaper than the equivalent fossil fuel in the European Union at that time was bioethanol from Brazilian sugarcane, although biodiesel from used oil and fat was only marginally…”
Large‐scale bioenergy from additional harvest of forest biomass is neither sustainable nor greenhouse gas neutral (2012, background): “Hence, incentives favouring bioenergy (i.e. production quota, subsidies, tax cuts) will be needed to complement or even replace fossil fuel-based technologies (Schneider & Kaltschmitt, 2000; Ryan et al., 2006; Ahtikoski et al., 2008; NRC, 2011).”
Fuel Versus Food (2009, background): “Source: Ryan et al. (2006).”
Promoting biofuels: Implications for developing countries (2008, background): “According to Ryan et al. (2006), 1000 l of European biodiesel saves 1.3 tons of GHG.4 Multiplying this figure by the ETS price of 41$ per ton yields a total of 53$ worth of abatement savings.”
Biodiesel Production by Microalgal Biotechnology (2018, background): “Because of the world energy crisis [1], many countries have started to take a series of measures to resolve this problem [2].”