US researchers say producing bioelectricity is more effective than biofuel for transport
Fri 08 May 2009
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Researchers writing for Science Daily say that it would be better to use biomass to generate electricity rather than ethanol for transport fuel. In terms of the 'miles per acre' potential, bioelectricity used for battery-powered vehicles would deliver an average of 80% more miles of transportation per acre of crops while also providing double the greenhouse gas offsets to mitigate climate change.
The study co-author Chris Field said: "It's a relatively obvious question once you ask it, but nobody had really asked it before, The kinds of motivations that have driven people to think about developing ethanol as a vehicle fuel have been somewhat different from those that have been motivating people to think about battery electric vehicles, but the overlap is in the area of maximizing efficiency and minimizing adverse impacts on climate."
Field is a professor of biology at Stanford University and a senior fellow at Stanford's Woods Institute for the Environment, Other contributors were from the University of California, Merced, and Stanford's Program on Food Security and the Environment.
The researchers performed a life-cycle analysis of both bioelectricity and ethanol technologies, taking into account not only the energy produced by each technology, but also the energy consumed in producing the vehicles and fuels. For the analysis, they used publicly available data on vehicle efficiencies from the US Environmental Protection Agency and other organizations.
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