 Using Cellulosic Ethanol to ‘Go Green’: What Price for Carbon?John A. Miranowski and Alicia Rosburg No 61395, 2010 Annual Meeting, July 25-27, 2010, Denver, Colorado from Agricultural and Applied Economics Association Abstract: The revised Renewable Fuels Standard (RFS2) mandates that cellulosic biofuels be part of the liquid transportation fuel mix and contribute to reducing our carbon footprint. Unfortunately, since no commercial cellulosic biorefinery exists and cellulosic biomass production is typically smaller scale than conventional crop production, limited knowledge exists of the actual costs of producing cellulosic biomass and converting it to cellulosic ethanol. Understanding of the implications of RFS2 requires a better understanding of the economics of producing cellulosic ethanol. We use the Biofuel Breakeven model (BIOBREAK), a simple long run breakeven model that represents the feedstock supply system and biofuel refining process, along with estimates of the potential reduction in carbon emissions from biofuels relative to conventional fuels, to derive the implicit carbon price (or carbon credit) needed to sustain a biomass market and cellulosic ethanol industry. We evaluate BIOBREAK under different oil prices, the RFS2 mandate, and with and without other biofuel incentives. Keywords: Environmental Economics and Policy; Resource/Energy Economics and Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:aaea10:61395 Access Statistics for this paper More papers in 2010 Annual Meeting, July 25-27, 2010, Denver, Colorado from Agricultural and Applied Economics Association Contact information at EDIRC. |
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