Economic Insights Required for Using Lifecycle Analysis for Policy Decisions

Richard Klotz, Antonio Bento () and Joel R. Landry

No 161654, 2014 Allied Social Sciences Association (ASSA) Annual Meeting, January 3-5, 2014, Philadelphia, PA from Agricultural and Applied Economics Association

Abstract: We develop an analytic and numerical model that integrates land, food and fuel markets and is linked with a sectoral emissions model to examine how the amount of biofuel in the economy impacts the lifecycle emissions of a biofuel under different policies. Our central finding is that the change in GHG emissions due to a unit expansion in biofuel will vary dramatically in the amount of biofuel in the economy and with the policy driving the expansion. The emissions from a unit expansion in corn ethanol due to a blend mandate fall from 12 gCO2e/MJ to 3 gCO2e/MJ, as the quantity of ethanol in the economy increases from 6 to 15 billion gallons. For an input subsidy, emissions due to a unit of ethanol increase from 15 gCO2e/MJ to 26 gCO2e/MJ over the same increase in ethanol. We discuss the implications of these results for lifecycle analysis.

Keywords: Environmental Economics and Policy; Resource/Energy Economics and Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 48
Date: 2013
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-ene and nep-env
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:aaeass:161654

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.161654

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