New Study Breaks Link Between Land Use, Biofuels

by Joanna Schroeder (DomesticFuel.com) In a new study released today (May 16, 2011) by Michigan State University (MSU), biofuel production in the United States through 2007, “probably has not induced any indirect land use change.” The report was conducted by Seungdo Kim and Bruce Dale, both MSU scientists, and the results will be published in the next issue of the Journal of Biomass and Bioenergy. ILUC is the theory that any acre used in the production of feedstocks for biofuels in the U.S. results in a new acre coming into food or feed production somewhere else in the world.
Dale and Kim empirically tested whether indirect land use change (ILUC) occurred through 2007 as a result of the expansion of the U.S. biofuels industry, spurred in part by the Renewable Fuels Standard (RFS2) that calls for 36 billion gallons of renewable fuel to be blended in fuel supplies by 2022. The researcher’s derived their conclusion after studying historical data on U.S. croplands, commodity grain exports to specific regions and land use trends in these geographical regions. READ MORE and MORE (Renewable Fuels Association) Abstract
From RFA's analysis: The Michigan State study relied on real world data that looked at acreage, production and trade data from the past two decades during a time of unprecedented growth in U.S. ethanol production. This is a stark difference between work done by and for the California Air Resources Board (ARB) and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Both CARB and EPA utilized assumption-driven future scenarios and highly uncertain economic modeling tools to develop point estimate ILUC penalties for biofuels that are enforceable by law. As Kim and Dale note in their analysis, “Prior iLUC studies have failed to compare their predictions to past global historical data.” READ MORE and MORE (25 x 25)