July 07, 2010
25 million acres of corn with nowhere to go, by 2030?
Published in Biofuels Digest
Buried inside the USDA’s Biofuels Strategic Production Report is a startling prediction from both EPA and USDA: if the Renewable Fuel Standard targets are to be met by 2022, there will be a wholesale change in US crop usage.
However, doomsayers who have been predicting an inevitable conflict between food and fuel appear to have been completely off the mark.
Rather than a shortage of food, the increased pace of biotechnology innovation associated with bioenergy is set to usher in a period of food abundance so intense that US food policy may have to move back towards crop subsidies, because there will be far more food available than the world will know what to do with.
The EPA and the USDA are differing on their projections for the feedstock mix that will support the RFS2 targets, but using EPA figures, which include projections for tallow, algae and municipal solid waste, the US is expected to cap its use of corn- and soy-based biofuels at 16.34 billion gallons.
Of this, roughly 16 billion will come from current uses of corn and soy (corn stover will form a key source for ethanol moving forward, and corn oil for biodiesel, but these are incremental production using the same corn crop).
The EPA projections are:
Switchgrass (perennial grass): 7.9 Bgy
Soy biodiesel and corn oil: 1.34 Bgy
Crop residues (corn stover, includes bagasse): 5.5 Bgy
Woody biomass (forestry residue): 0.1 Bgy
Corn ethanol: 15.0 Bgy
Other (municipal solid waste (MSW)): 2.6 Bgy
Animal fats and yellow grease: 0.38 Bgy
Algae: 0.1 Bgy
Imports: 2.2 Bgy
The EPA and USDA ...
