Global Scenarios for Biofuels: Impacts and Implications

In recent years, bioenergy has drawn attention as a sustainable energy source that may help cope with rising energy prices, but also maybe provide income to poor farmers and rural communities around the globe. Given the numerous and high level of uncertainties regarding future biofuel supply, demand, and technologies, the paper examines three alternative scenarios: a conventional scenario, which focuses on rapid global growth in biofuel production under conventional conversion technologies; a second generation scenario, which incorporates a ‘softening’ of demand on food crops due to 2nd generation, lignocellulosic technologies coming online; and a ‘second generation plus scenario’, which adds crop productivity improvements to the second generation scenario, which essentially further reduce potentially adverse impacts from expansion of biofuels.