WRI: Biofuels Only One Answer for World's Transport Fuel Needs

January 15, 2008 // Published as a news service by IHS

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Promotion of biofuels should focus on ensuring environmental performance and deploying new technologies, according to the World Resources Institute (WRI), rather than on high-volume production of the biofuels in use today.

Biofuels are being heralded as an alternative to oil that can be grown by farmers across the globe, reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and addressing many of the economic, security and environmental concerns associated with oil dependence.

Analysts said the solution is not that simple, however, because the life-cycle energy efficiency and environmental impacts of biofuels vary significantly, depending on feedstocks, production methods and scale.

WRI examined the feasibility of achieving significant reductions of GHG emissions from greater production of biofuels, and concluded that biofuels are not a complete, nor even the primary, solution to the world's transport fuel needs.

"Policy makers need to focus more on ensuring that biofuels actually deliver environmental and energy benefits than on ramping up production," said WRI's Britt Childs. "Today's biofuels pose real risks to food supply and forests that need to be better understood."

Biofuels have the potential to play some role in meeting future energy demand, analysts said. But since large-scale carbon displacement would require significant destruction of global forests, the benefits of biofuels would likely be outweighed by the costs with respect to forestry, agriculture markets and economic hardship for the world's poor.

New sustainability standards under development in different parts of the world can help address these challenges, analysts said, but many impacts are still poorly understood.

Analysts said some technology incentives will make rapid scale-up of next-generation biofuels particularly challenging.

"Next generation biofuels technologies may address some of the environmental issues and represent some genuinely interesting investment opportunities," said Rob Bradley, director of WRI's International Climate Policy Initiative.

"As with all new technologies, market penetration may be slower than we hope, but in time they may have a significant role in a broader set of sustainable transport policies."

The WRI report is available online at http://www.wri.org/publication/plants-at-the-pump.

Source: World Resources Institute (WRI).