Biofuels and carbon management

Abstract

Public policy supports biofuels for their benefits to agricultural economies, energy security and the environment. The environmental rationale is premised on greenhouse gas (GHG, "carbon") emissions reduction, which is a matter of contention. This issue is challenging to resolve because of critical but difficult-to-verify assumptions in lifecycle analysis (LCA), limits of available data and disputes about system boundaries. Although LCA has been the presumptive basis of climate policy for fuels, careful consideration indicates that it is inappropriate for defining regulations. This paper proposes a method using annual basis carbon (ABC) accounting to track the stocks and flows of carbon and other relevant GHGs throughout fuel supply chains. Such an approach makes fuel and feedstock production facilities the focus of accounting while treating the CO 2 emissions from fuel end-use at face value regardless of the origin of the fuel carbon (bio-or fossil). Integrated into cap-and-trade policy and including provisions for mitigating indirect land-use change impacts, also evaluated on an annual basis, an ABC approach would provide a sound carbon management framework for the transportation fuels sector.

Carbon balance effects of U.S. biofuel production and use

“…DeCicco (2012) proposed an Annual Basis Carbon (ABC) accounting method that treats all carbon flows in a spatially and temporally explicit manner. Unlike LCA or other forms of carbon accounting used for climate policy to date, it does not treat biofuels as inherently carbon neutral.…”

Policy options to address global land use change from biofuels

“…A ''pay-as-you-go'' approach, which assesses LUC emissions in the year they occur, advocated by some, leads to very high ILUC factors. The approach sends a much stronger policy signal that weighs immediate GHG effects highly DeCicco, 2011).…”

Can Carbon in Bioenergy Crops Mitigate Global Climate Change?

“…Energy system designs involving C-based energy vectors integrated with value-added C management technologies already constitute key components of C management systems [23,75]. While climate protection may have been a rationale for promoting biofuels [12,42,57,180], public support for biofuels rested on their value for rural economic development and was amplified by concerns about energy security [7,9,158,189,239,303]. Biospheric C management may result in increased or decreased C stocks in one or more of its pools; the process, which is not directly and entirely under human control, however, can be reversed, either accidentally or intentionally through subsequence land-use change [23,41,151,302].…”

“…Although many environmentalists promoted biofuels, climate concerns may have not been a solid foundation for public biofuel policies [42] (see Section 14.14). Carbon management strategies focus on offsetting anthropogenic emissions through human-enhanced natural removal of C from the atmosphere to other C pools.…”