Today is the fifth annual national Dump the Pump day, where the APTA encourages U.S. commuters all to use public transportation. The APTA urges uses of buses, trolleys, light rail networks, and even water taxis, and notes that public transportation in the United States is a crucial part of the solution to the nation’s economic, energy and environmental challenges–helping to bring a better quality of life. Read More
Dump The Pump
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