Cellulosic biofuel should take less fossil fuel to make than corn ethanol
Most plans for making cellulosic biofuels involve using byproducts normally considered waste—like corncobs, or sawdust from lumber mills. So it will not take a lot of extra energy or fertilizer to gather these ingredients, which were being produced anyway—a key reason cellulosic biofuels are likely to need less fossil fuel input than corn ethanol.
And if cellulosic fuel is being made from trees and grasses grown for that purpose, these, unlike corn, could be grown on land not well suited for food crop production without a lot of fossil-fuel intensive cultivation.
This reduced fuel use is likely to result in lower greenhouse-gas emissions during the lifecycle of cellulosic fuels—significantly lower in some cases— than corn ethanol as it’s currently produced in the US.1 2 3 Climate Central scientist Eric Larson has written a paper summarizing the results of life-cycle analyses for many biofuels.
References
- Larson, Eric D. “A review of life-cycle analysis studies on liquid biofuel systems for the transport sector.” (PDF) Energy for Sustainable Development X, no. No. 2 (June 2006). ↩
- Farrell, Alexander E., Richard J. Plevin, Brian T. Turner, Andrew D. Jones, Michael O'Hare, and Daniel M. Kammen. “Ethanol Can Contribute to Energy and Environmental Goals.” (PDF) Science 311, no. 5760 (January 27, 2006): 506-508. ↩
- Tilman, David, Jason Hill, and Clarence Lehman. “Carbon-Negative Biofuels from Low-Input High-Diversity Grassland Biomass.” (PDF) Science 314, no. 5805 (December 8, 2006): 1598-1600. ↩
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