Pathway to a land-neutral expansion of Brazilian renewable fuel production

Luis Ramirez Camargo (), Gabriel Castro, Katharina Gruber, Jessica Jewell, Michael Klingler, Olga Turkovska, Elisabeth Wetterlund and Johannes Schmidt ()
Additional contact information
Luis Ramirez Camargo: University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences
Gabriel Castro: University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences
Katharina Gruber: University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences
Jessica Jewell: Chalmers University of Technology
Michael Klingler: University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences
Olga Turkovska: University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences
Elisabeth Wetterlund: International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA)
Johannes Schmidt: University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences

Nature Communications, 2022, vol. 13, issue 1, 1-10

Abstract: Abstract Biofuels are currently the only available bulk renewable fuel. They have, however, limited expansion potential due to high land requirements and associated risks for biodiversity, food security, and land conflicts. We therefore propose to increase output from ethanol refineries in a land-neutral methanol pathway: surplus CO2-streams from fermentation are combined with H2 from renewably powered electrolysis to synthesize methanol. We illustrate this pathway with the Brazilian sugarcane ethanol industry using a spatio-temporal model. The fuel output of existing ethanol generation facilities can be increased by 43%–49% or ~100 TWh without using additional land. This amount is sufficient to cover projected growth in Brazilian biofuel demand in 2030. We identify a trade-off between renewable energy generation technologies: wind power requires the least amount of land whereas a mix of wind and solar costs the least. In the cheapest scenario, green methanol is competitive to fossil methanol at an average carbon price of 95€ tCO2−1.

Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-30850-2 Abstract (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:natcom:v:13:y:2022:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-022-30850-2

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/ncomms/

DOI: 10.1038/s41467-022-30850-2

Access Statistics for this article

Nature Communications is currently edited by Nathalie Le Bot, Enda Bergin and Fiona Gillespie

More articles in Nature Communications from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().