The water footprint of bioenergy

By Winnie Gerbens-Leenes, Arjen Y. Hoekstra, T. H. van der Meer. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2009

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All energy scenarios show a shift toward an increased percentage of renewable energy sources, including biomass. This study gives an overview of water footprints (WFs) of bioenergy from 12 crops that currently contribute the most to global agricultural production: barley, cassava, maize, potato, rapeseed, rice, rye, sorghum, soybean, sugar beet, sugar cane, and wheat. In addition, this study includes jatropha, a suitable energy crop. Since climate and production circumstances differ among regions, calculations have been performed by country. The WF of bioelectricity is smaller than that of biofuels because it is more efficient to use total biomass (e.g., for electricity or heat) than a fraction of the crop (its sugar, starch, or oil content) for biofuel. The WF of bioethanol appears to be smaller than that of biodiesel. For electricity, sugar beet, maize, and sugar cane are the most favorable crops [50 m3/gigajoule (GJ)]. Rapeseed and jatropha, typical energy crops, are disadvantageous (400 m3/GJ). For ethanol, sugar beet, and potato (60 and 100 m3/GJ) are the most advantageous, followed by sugar cane (110 m3/GJ); sorghum (400 m3/GJ) is the most unfavorable. For biodiesel, soybean and rapeseed show to be the most favorable WF (400 m3/GJ); jatropha has an adverse WF (600 m3/GJ). When expressed per L, the WF ranges from 1,400 to 20,000 L of water per L of biofuel. If a shift toward a greater contribution of bioenergy to energy supply takes place, the results of this study can be used to select the crops and countries that produce bioenergy in the most water-efficient way.

Subfields: Environmental Engineering, Pollution, Water Science and Technology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f15667d4b8ed09755fec8a2d500ecc792ca9c72c

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Citations in the corpus

Biofuels from algae: challenges and potential (2010, background): “Perhaps surprisingly, algae grown in open ponds have water requirements per unit area similar to that of cotton or wheat, but less than that of corn, to replenish the water lost in evaporation (for an overview of water requirements of terrestrial plants used in biofuel production see [33]).”
Evolving water science in the Anthropocene (2013, background): “Current policies that stimulate the production of biofuels aggravate many of the existing water problems in the world, simply because growing crops for bioenergy requires a lot of water (De Fraiture et al., 2008; Gerbens-Leenes et al., 2009).”
Abandoning the concept of renewable energy (2019, background): “First, large scale biofuel production can threaten biodiversity due to the land area and water it needs (Gerbens-Leenes et al. 2009; Erb, Haberl, and Plutzar 2012; Pedroli et al. 2013; Immerzee et al. 2014).”
Macroalgal biorefinery concepts for the circular bioeconomy: A review on biotechnological developments and future perspectives (2021, background): “5 to 10 L of water for each litre of bioethanol produced [209].”
Biofuel scenarios in a water perspective: the global blue and green water footprint of road transport in 2030 (2012, methodology): “Step 3: determine blue and green crop water requirement For a large number of energy crops, Gerbens-Leenes et al. (2008; 2009a; 2009b) have calculated blue and green crop water requirements (CWRs) .”
Jatropha plantations for biodiesel in Tamil Nadu, India: Viability, livelihood trade-offs, and latent conflict (2010, background): “…unit of energy produced from Jatropha has been reported to be 1.5 times higher than soybean and 5 times higher than ethanol from sugarcane or maize (Gerbens-Leenes et al., 2009b). diameter, and number of branches) are not presented here for lack of space but their variations are in consonance with…”
Climate policies for road transport revisited (I): Evaluation of the current framework (2011, background): “Other scholars have recently highlighted sustainability challenges associated with water use in the lifecycle of biofuels (Gerbens-Leenes et al., 2009) or the potentially high health costs of air emissions from first generation biofuels (Hill et al.”