The Global Renewable Fuels Alliance (GRFA), in cooperation with F.O. Licht, released its global annual ethanol production forecast last week.
The GRFA forecasts ethanol production to hit 23.4 billion gallons in 2011, replacing the need for 1 million barrels of crude oil per day worldwide. This highlights the growing impact that ethanol production is having on reducing the world's reliance on crude oil.
The GRFA predicts a growth of more than 3 percent in global production in 2011, up from 22.7 billion gallons in 2010. Global production has now surpassed 550 million barrels of ethanol per year according to data compiled by F.O. Licht.
The United States continues to be the largest ethanol producer in the world with production levels expected to reach 13.5 billion gallons in 2011.
The African continent has tremendous potential for biofuels production; however, production levels remain very low despite recent efforts by some countries to kick-start biofuel programs. The African continent is forecast to produce 44.9 million gallons of ethanol in 2011, despite sub-Saharan Africa having 2.47 billion acres of rain-fed, crop-producing land that could be producing biomass for ethanol, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.
A recent World Bank report highlighted Africa's biofuel potential, suggesting that high energy prices and the availability of productive land represent an enormous opportunity for African biofuels production.
In 2011 will be critical for Europe as member countries ramp up their production and use of ethanol to meet the European Union's Renewable Energy Directive. Europe is expected to produce 1.4 billion gallons of ethanol this year, a 15 percent increase over 2010.
In related news, a new study from the University of Illinois concludes that very high biomass prices would be needed in order to meet the ambitious goal of replacing 30 percent of petroleum consumption in the U.S. with biofuels by 2030.
A team of researchers led by Madhu Khanna, a professor of agricultural and consumer economics at Illinois, shows that between 600 million and 900 million metric tons of biomass could be produced in 2030 at a price of $140 per metric ton (in 2007 dollars) while still meeting demand for food, with current assumptions about yields, production costs and land availability.
The paper, published in the American Journal of Agricultural Economics, is the first to study the technical potential and costs associated with producing a billion tons of biomass from different agricultural feedstocks — including corn stover, wheat straw, switchgrass and miscanthus — at a national level.
According to the study, not only would this require producing about a billion tons of biomass every year in the U.S., but also it would mean using a part of the available land currently enrolled in the Conservation Reserve Program for energy crop production. That could significantly increase biomass production and keep biomass costs low.
The study also contends that the economic viability of cellulosic biofuels depends on significant policy support in the form of the biofuel mandate and incentives for agricultural producers for harvesting, storing and delivering biomass as well as switching land from conventional crops to perennial grasses.
With biofuels, there's also the common perception that there's an unavoidable trade-off between fuel and food, Khanna said.
But relying on crop residues alone won't be sufficient to scale production up to levels set by the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, which limits the production of corn ethanol to 14.8 billion gallons after 2015, and mandates the production of at least 21 billion of the 36 billion gallons of ethanol from non-corn starch-based cellulosic feedstocks by 2022.
Because even marginal land is costly and has some alternative use, both now and in the future, using it as efficiently as possible means focusing more on the highest-yielding energy crops, Khanna said.
