Biofuel vs. biodiversity? Integrated emergy and economic cost-benefit evaluation of rice-ethanol production in Japan

Hongfang Lu, Bin-Le Lin, Daniel E. Campbell, Masayuki Sagisaka and Hai Ren

Energy, 2012, vol. 46, issue 1, 442-450

Abstract: Energy analysis results confirmed that abandoned rice fields provide a good opportunity for Japan to fulfill its E-3 target by producing ethanol from high-yield rice feedstock. However, to be a viable alternative, a biofuel should not only provide a net energy gain and reduce the emissions of polluting gases, but also be ecologically and economically competitive. Thus, an integrated ecological-economic evaluation was done to determine the viability of the process, the opportunity cost of biodiversity loss and the quality of the energies consumed and produced. The results showed that although ethanol from high-yield rice has a net energy yield, it is currently neither ecologically nor economically feasible to use it to replace gasoline as a transport fuel in Japan. There is a positive effect in that polluting gas emissions are reduced, but this benefit is too small to change the large negative balance in both the emergy and economic accounts. Furthermore, converting an abandoned rice field to the cultivation of intensified high-yield rice feedstock could have a large negative effect on biodiversity at both genetic and species levels, which if fully realized, would be over 300 times the ecological economic value of the rice-ethanol output.

Keywords: Net energy yield; Biodiversity loss; Polluting gas reductions; Economic viability; Emergy synthesis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (14)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0360544212006172
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:energy:v:46:y:2012:i:1:p:442-450

DOI: 10.1016/j.energy.2012.08.005

Access Statistics for this article

Energy is currently edited by Henrik Lund and Mark J. Kaiser

More articles in Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().