Latest research says biofuel production won’t seriously affect forestry industry

In Sweden, researchers from Luleå University of Technology (LTU), IIASA, and RISE Research Institutes of Sweden found that increased biofuel production will not affect the production of wood products and that increased biofuel targets will introduce fringe feedstocks to the fuel mix. An opportunity that the forest industry, including sawmills and pulp mills, provides is the availability of by-products that could be used for biofuel production. Three types of by-products are of interest: forest residues, bark and sawdust.

The report focused on Sweden and showed that increased biofuel targets will, in general, have limited price effects on woody feedstocks. We can reach biofuel targets using many technologies and localization options with reasonable costs. There are many different ways to reach high levels of biofuel production in Sweden, at reasonable costs, and the dependency on specific locations or technologies is not particularly strong. Economy-of-scale and high biomass-to-biofuel conversion efficiencies provide the largest potentials for decreased production costs, which benefits large-scale gasification-based biofuel production, which in turn would require substantial investments in capital intensive production concepts.