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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

Producing biomass results in the fixing of atmospheric carbon dioxide into organic carbon.

Converting this biomass to a useable fermentation feedstock (typically some form of sugar) can be achieved using a variety of different process technologies. These processes for fermentation feedstock production constitute the critical differences among all of the bioethanol technology options.

Fermenting the biomass intermediates using biocatalysts (microorganisms including yeast and bacteria) to produce ethanol in a relatively dilute aqueous solution is probably the oldest form of biotechnology developed by humankind.

Processing the fermentation product yields fuel-grade ethanol and byproducts that can be used to produce other fuels, chemicals, heat and/or electricity.

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