Biofuel & 3Es

Biofuel are being supported by many governments for a range of perceived benefits including improved domestic energy security, reduced greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions when compared with fossil‐fuel counterparts, and economic development and employment generation, particularly in rural areas.  Life‐cycle, cost‐benefit, and systems analyses, however, indicate that the expansion of biofuels can have complex effects on, and interactions with, land use and food and fuel prices.

  • Department of Biotechnology has been promoting R&D for biofuel technology development recognizing the need for clean and renewable energy for transportation. 
  • Government of India has recently in June 2018 announced new policy on Biofuels and an indicative target of 20% blending of ethanol in petrol and 5% blending of biodiesel in diesel is proposed by 2030.
  • Department has taken significant efforts in this direction with major focus on 2nd generation biofuels.

Economic Security & Biofuels:

  • Replacing fossil fuels with biofuels—fuels produced from renewable organic material—has the potential to reduce some undesirable aspects of fossil fuel production and use, including conventional and greenhouse gas (GHG) pollutant emissions, exhaustible resource depletion, and dependence on unstable foreign suppliers.
  • Demand for biofuels could also increase farm income. On the other hand, because many biofuel feedstocks require land, water, and other resources, research suggests that biofuel production may give rise to several undesirable effects. 
  • Potential drawbacks include changes to land use patterns that may increase GHG emissions, pressure on water resources, air and water pollution, and increased food costs. 
  • Depending on the feedstock and production process and time horizon of the analysis, biofuels can emit even more GHGs than some fossil fuels on an energy-equivalent basis.
  • Biofuels also tend to require subsidies and other market interventions to compete economically with fossil fuels, which creates deadweight losses in the economy.
  • Economic models show that biofuel use can result in higher crop prices, though the range of estimates in the literature is wide.
  • For example, a 2013 study found projections for the effect of biofuels on corn prices in 2015 ranging from a 5 to a 53 percent increase .
  • The National Research Council’s (2011) report on the RFS included several studies finding a 20 to 40 percent increase in corn prices from biofuels during 2007 to 2009. 
  • A National Center for Environmental Economics (NCEE) working paper found a 2 to 3 percent increase in long-run corn prices for each billion gallon increase in corn ethanol production on average across 19 studies. 
  • Higher crop prices lead to higher food prices, though impacts on retail food in the US are expected to be small (NRC 2011). 
  • Higher crop prices may lead to higher rates of malnutrition in developing countries. 

Environmental Security & Biofuel

  • The replacement of fossil fuels with fuels generated from biomass would have significant and positive climate-change effects by generating lower levels of the greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming.
  • Bioenergy crops can reduce or offset greenhouse gas emissions by directly removing carbon dioxide from the air as they grow and storing it in crop biomass and soil.I
  • In addition to biofuels, many of these crops generate co-products such as protein for animal feed, thus saving on energy that would have been used to make feed by other means.
  • The Sustainable Alternative Towards Affordable Transportation (SATAT) scheme launched in October 2018 aims to establish an ecosystem for production of compressed biogas (CBG) from various waste biomass sources in the country.

Energy Security & Biofuels:

Substantial potential exists to expand both food and fuel supply in a sustainable fashion.

These include:

  • Boosting yields of food crops and residues;
  • Freeing up farmland through yield improvements;
  • Reducing losses and waste in the food chain;
  • Freeing up pastureland through better livestock management.

Further biofuel potential could also be unlocked through:

  • Afforestation using fast-growing trees;
  • Algae cultivation from organic waste or carbon dioxide.

Way Forward:

  • Part of this potential can be harnessed through “first-generation” technologies, which produce biofuel from crops like sugar cane, maize and palm oil.
  • More can be harnessed through “second-generation” technologies, which convert lignocellulose from farm and forest residues, grasses and wood. 
  • More still can be harnessed through “third-generation” technologies to produce biofuel from algae.
  • Due to rising oil prices and depleting fossil fuel reserves, interest in biofuels has increased over the last decades, with first-generation (1G) biofuels falling behind coal, oil, and gas in several performance dimensions.
  • Advanced biofuels (2G, 3G) can contribute to sustainable transportation. Their manufacturing involves microorganisms, predominantly bacteria, yeasts, and algae. Such biofuels can replace liquid and gaseous transportation fuels.
  • current challenges are the use of lignocellulosic biomass (2nd-generation biofuels), which is available abundantly, by thermal or enzymatic methods. 
  • Hopes are placed on 3rd-generation biofuels, i.e., energetic compounds obtained from microorganisms like algae or cyanobacteria from sunlight. These technologies have not yet reached commercial maturity, and metabolic engineering can support research efforts.