Biomass Energy and Competition for Land

By J. Reilly, S. Paltsev. GTAP Working Paper, 2008

111 citations recorded by the source corpus.

*Chapter 8 of the forthcoming book "Economic Analysis of Land Use in Global Climate Change Policy," edited by Thomas W. Hertel, Steven Rose, and Richard S.J. Tol We describe an approach for incorporating biomass energy production and competition for land into the MIT Emissions Prediction and Policy Analysis (EPPA) model, a computable general equilibrium model of the world economy. We examine multiple scenarios where greenhouse gas emissions are abated or not. The global increase in biomass energy use in a reference scenario (without climate change policy) is about 30 EJ/year by 2050 and about 180 EJ/year by 2100. This deployment is driven primarily by a world oil price that in the year 2100 is over 4.5 times the price in the year 2000. In the scenarios of stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations, the global biomass energy production increases to 50-150 EJ/year by 2050 and 220-250 EJ/year by 2100. The estimated area of land required to produce 180-250 EJ/year is about 1 Gha, which is an equivalent of the current global cultivated area. In the USA we find that under a stringent climate policy biofuels could supply about 55% of USA liquid fuel demand, but if the biofuels were produced domestically the USA would turn from a substantial net exporter of agricultural goods ($20 billion) to a large net importer ($80 billion). The general conclusion is that the scale of energy use in the USA and the world relative to biomass potential is so large that a biofuel industry that was supplying a substantial share of liquid fuel demand would have very significant effects on land use and conventional agricultural markets.

Subfields: Agronomy and Crop Science, Biomedical Engineering, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e1562b0c6816b9906846518d3543625a49cc1be7

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Citations in the corpus

Global trade and environmental impact study of the EU biofuels mandate. (2010, methodology): “Reilly and Paltsev (2007) and Gurgel, Reilly and Paltsev et al. (2007) employed this approach in looking at the potential land use implications of a global biofuels development focusing on second generation biofuels .”
Integrating Bioenergy into Computable General Equilibrium Models – A Survey (2010, methodology): “Unlike the other studies mentioned in this paper, Reilly and Paltsev (2007) look much further into the future and project the world economy into the year 2100.”
Potential Land Use Implications of a Global Biofuels Industry (2007, background): “model to the biofuels question is reported in Reilly and Paltsev (2007). We have augmented that version of the model in several ways to address the questions we raise here.”
Some Contributions of Integrated Assessment Models of Global Climate Change (2017, background): “…and power plant cooling that would occur in a hotter and dryer climate, and the impacts on water and land (and the resulting land emissions) of global policies that rely on massive increases in biofuels (Reilly and Paltsev 2009; Reilly et al. 2012a; Daioglu et al. 2014; Rose et al. 2014a).”
Biofuels and their By-Products: Global Economic and Environmental Implications (2010, background): “Appendix A lists sectors, commodities, and regions covered in the modified aggregated database.”
Impact of Biofuel Production on World Agricultural Markets: A Computable General Equilibrium Analysis (2007, unknown): “Several studies in the recent past have focused on modeling production of biomass or cellulosic ethanol in a long run, recursive-dynamic CGE framework (Reilly and Paltsev, 2007; Dixon, Osborne, and Rimmer, 2007).”