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A proposed increase in ethanol use in gasoline would require planting as much as 111 million acres of corn and using almost half of the crop for the fuel by 2015, according to a study by the U.S. grocery industry.

Boosting the amount of biofuels allowed to be blended in gasoline could make last year’s record corn prices “look like a walk in the park,” Bill Lapp, an agricultural analyst who conducted the study commissioned by the Grocery Manufacturers Association, told reporters today in a teleconference.
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The quantity of land available to grow biofuel crops without impacting food prices or greenhouse gas emissions from land conversion is limited. Therefore, bioenergy should maximize land-use efficiency when addressing transportation and climate change goals. Biomass could power either internal combustion or electric vehicles, but the relative land-use efficiency of these two energy pathways is not well quantified. Here, we show that bioelectricity outperforms ethanol across a range of feedstocks, conversion technologies, and vehicle classes. Bioelectricity produces an average 81% more transportation kilometers and 108% more emissions offsets per unit area cropland than cellulosic ethanol. These results suggest that alternative bioenergy pathways have large differences in how efficiently they use the available land to achieve transportation and climate goals.

Greater Transportation Energy and GHG Offsets from Bioelectricity Than Ethanol