Quantifying the land-use change due to soybean-based biodiesel in the United States

We quantify the impact of soybean oil-based biodiesel production on US cropland, using a method that accounts for the intermediate effect of soybean crushing facilities. Based on U.S. Environmental Protection Agency data for biodiesel production and proprietary data for soybean crushing facilities over 2011–2020, we find that the elasticities of soybean acreage and total cropland acreage with respect to soybean oil-based biodiesel production are 0.011 and 0.002, respectively. The direct land-use effect of soybean oil-based biodiesel is about 0.96 million acres of cropland expansion per billion gallons, about twice as high as some estimates for corn ethanol from previous studies.

Impact/Purpose

In the Third Triennial Report to Congress on Biofuels (RtC3), we utilized a study by Li et al. which was the most sophisticated approach available to estimate spatially the independent effects from corn price and corn ethanol production on land use change at the county-level across the CONUS. Here we extend that approach to examine the effects of soybean price and soybean biodiesel production on land use change.

Citation

Miao, R., Y. Li, M. Khanna, C. Clark, D. Burkholder, AND L. Chen. Quantifying the land-use change due to soybean-based biodiesel in the United States. Oxford University Press, Cary, NC, 48(1):20-47, (2026). [DOI: 10.1002/aepp.70005]

DOI: Quantifying the land-use change due to soybean-based biodiesel in the United States