Biofuel Policies: The Underground Limitation on Biofuels

Michael Barrowclough () and L. Geyer

International Advances in Economic Research, 2015, vol. 21, issue 1, 55-65

Abstract: U.S. energy policy has seen a dramatic shift toward renewable fuels within the last 10 years. While much research has been conducted in regards to U.S. biofuel policies, a significant arena of debate has been neglected. A key argument in favor of domestic biofuel production is that it is a renewable path towards energy independence. However the inputs used in the production of biofuel feedstock, primarily fertilizer nutrients, are anything but renewable. With simple calculations, this paper shows that the U.S.’s current biofuel policy is heavily dependent on non-renewable nutrient inputs. Thus, the question of how renewable the current plant-based biofuels are needs to be asked. Copyright International Atlantic Economic Society 2015

Keywords: Biofuels; Exhaustible resource; Fertilizer; Nutrients; Renewable resource; Q01; Q16; Q18; Q30; O38 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s11294-015-9513-4 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:kap:iaecre:v:21:y:2015:i:1:p:55-65:10.1007/s11294-015-9513-4

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/11294

DOI: 10.1007/s11294-015-9513-4

Access Statistics for this article

International Advances in Economic Research is currently edited by Katherine S. Virgo

More articles in International Advances in Economic Research from Springer, International Atlantic Economic Society Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().