Achieving recommended biofuel production targets could be unrealistic and detrimental to the environment and U.S. food supply, according to a new study released by the University of Montana.
Roughly 80 percent of the farmland in the country would need to be devoted to growing corn for ethanol to meet current biofuel production goals using today’s technology, according to a report published recently in Environmental Science & Technology, a journal of the American Chemical Society.
The 2007 Energy Independence and Security Act set a goal of increasing U.S. biofuel production from 40 billion to 136 billion gallons of ethanol by 2022.
For that to happen, W. Kolby Smith, a doctoral student in UM’s Numerical Terradynamic Simulation Group, said farmers would either need to plant biofuel crops on 80 percent of their farmland or plant biofuel crops on 60 percent of the land currently used to raise livestock. Both options would significantly reduce the amount of food U.S. farmers produce. Research also showed the increased farming could lead to more polluted freshwater and accelerate global climate change.
“We learned that gaps exist in the ability to establish realistic targets for biofuel production, which the law fills with assumptions about technology developments and the availability and productivity of farmland,” Smith said in a news release.
“To establish more accurate estimates, we used satellite data about the climate, plant cover and usable land to determine how much biofuel the U.S. could produce.”
Steve Running, one of the foremost experts on climate change in the U.S. who earned a share of the Nobel Peace Prize for his research, co-authored the report. He said using bioenergy to produce electric power instead of liquid fuels could be more efficient.
“While we encourage the appropriate use of agricultural residues, forest slash and beetle-killed trees for bioenergy, the nation needs realistic targets of the capacity for bioenergy production that would not compete with food production,” Running, the NTSG director and Regents Professor of Ecology, said.
Cory Cleveland, an assistant professor of soil sciences, also contributed to the UM study along with Sasha Reed of the U.S. Geological Survey in Moab, Utah, and Norman Miller of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, Calif.
The report, titled “Bioenergy Potential of the United States Constrained by Satellite Observations of Existing Productivity,” is available online.