Biofuels and the need for additional carbon

By T. Searchinger. 2010

201 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Use of biofuels does not reduce emissions from energy combustion but may offset emissions by increasing plant growth or by reducing plant residue or other non-energy emissions. To do so, biofuel production must generate and use ‘additional carbon’, which means carbon that plants would not otherwise absorb or that would be emitted to the atmosphere anyway. When biofuels cause no direct land use change, they use crops that would grow regardless of biofuels so they do not directly absorb additional carbon. All potential greenhouse gas reductions from such biofuels, as well as many potential emission increases, result from indirect effects, including reduced crop consumption, price-induced yield gains and land conversion. If lifecycle analyses ignore indirect effects of biofuels, they therefore cannot properly find greenhouse gas reductions. Uncertainties in estimating indirect emission reductions and increases are largely symmetrical. The failure to distinguish ‘additional’ carbon from carbon already absorbed or withheld from the atmosphere also leads to large overestimates of global bioenergy potential. Reasonable confidence in greenhouse gas reductions requires a precautionary approach to estimating indirect effects that does not rely on any single model. Reductions can be more directly assured, and other adverse indirect effects avoided, by focusing on biofuels from directly additional carbon.

Subfields: Agronomy and Crop Science, Biomedical Engineering, Environmental Engineering

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5e67768c3d71b1dbff458bfec04ba58427c92e00

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Citations in the corpus

Palm oil-based biofuels and sustainability in southeast Asia: A review of Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand (2014, background): “More recently, studies by Searchinger [17] and Haberl et al. [17,25] indicate that if LCA analyses were to include the biofuel's emissions during combustion, this amount can only be offset by growing biomass additional to the one used to produce the fuel [25].”
Stochastic and epistemic uncertainty propagation in LCA (2013, background): “One of the most critical impacts associated with energy crops is related to land use changes (LUC) defined as the consequences determined by the conversion of the land from one use to another use (Edwards et al. 2010; Searchinger et al. 2008; Searchinger 2010).”
Two sides of the same coin: consequential life cycle assessment based on the attributional framework (2016, background): “But in this case the amount of additional fertilizers and pesticides applied to produce additional corn would be much higher than that applied to produce existing corn (Searchinger, 2010).”
The ‘debt’ is in the detail: A synthesis of recent temporal forest carbon analyses on woody biomass for energy (2013, background): “(3) Replacement of the marginal energy production technology (along the merit-order) that would have been used/built had biomass not been used for energy (e.”
Indirect Land Use Change From Increased Biofuels Demand - Comparison of Models and Results for Marginal Biofuels Production from Different Feedstocks (2010, background): “But using plant carbon is not free because it means the carbon, or the ability of land to support photosynthesis of other plants, cannot be used for other purposes (Searchinger, 2010).”