Land use effects of biofuel production in the US

Biodiesel production from soybean has been growing in the United States and although its amount is small by comparison with corn ethanol, its addition to existing demands on land can have nonlinear effects on land use, due to an upward sloping and increasingly inelastic supply of land. It is critical to quantify these effects to inform future policies that may expand production of soy biodiesel. Here we apply a multi-period, partial equilibrium economic model (BEPAM) to determine land use under a validated counterfactual scenario with no biofuel policy or with corn ethanol mandate alone to isolate the extent to which expansion of biodiesel production in the US led to the conversion of Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) acres and other noncropland to crop production, over the 2007–2018 period. We find that the land use change intensity of biodiesel ranged from 0.78 to 1.5 million acres per billion gallons in 2018 which is substantially higher than that of corn ethanol, that ranged from 0.57 to 0.75; estimates at the lower end of these ranges are obtained under the assumption that there is no conversion of permanent pastureland to cropland and better supported by model validation than the upper end of these ranges. The land use change elasticity with respect to changes in land rent was more inelastic for biodiesel than for corn ethanol. The largest levels of expansion in cropland were in Iowa, Minnesota, North Dakota, Kansas, Michigan and Mississippi.

Impact/Purpose

Concerns exist over the effect of biofuels and the RFS Program on land use change and the environment in the U.S. The effects from corn ethanol have been examined in detail, but similar investigation has not occurred for other biofuels, notably soybean biodiesel, the second most common biofuel in the U.S. The purpose of this effort is to assess the effects from soybean biodiesel production on land use change and the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) in the U.S. Here we apply a multi-period, partial equilibrium economic model (BEPAM) to determine land use under a validated counterfactual scenario with no biofuel policy or with corn ethanol mandate alone to isolate the extent to which expansion of biodiesel production in the U.S. led to the conversion of CRP acres and other noncropland to crop production, over the 2007–2018 period. We find that the land use change intensity of biodiesel ranged from 0.78 to 1.5 million acres per billion gallons in 2018 which is higher than that of corn ethanol, that ranged from 0.57 to 0.75. The largest levels of expansion in cropland were in Iowa, Minnesota, North Dakota, Kansas, Michigan and Mississippi. These findings indicate that minor biofuels (i.e., those other than corn ethanol) may have a larger effect per gallon on the environment, which have significant implications on the future potential of biofuels in the U.S. Energy and resource managers will find this information useful for developing transportation policies and for developing safeguards to minimize potential environmental effects.

Citation

Wang, W. AND M. Khanna. Land use effects of biofuel production in the US. IOP Publishing, BRISTOL, UK, 5:055007, (2023). [DOI: 10.1088/2515-7620/acd1d7]

DOI: Land use effects of biofuel production in the US