THE POTENTIAL VIABILITY OF BIOMASS ETHANOL AS A RENEWABLE FUEL SOURCE: A DISCUSSION

Lawton Nalley and Darren Hudson

No 15808, Staff Reports from Mississippi State University, Department of Agricultural Economics

Abstract: Much attention has been paid to alternative fuel sources of late. Ethanol has been a politically popular alternative fuel additive and has recently been pushed to the forefront as a leading replacement to MTBE as an oxygenate. This paper examines the potential markets for ethanol, including biomass ethanol, and discusses the strengths and weaknesses of different oxygenate products. We find that the market for ethanol is tenuous and dependent on government support at this time. Biomass ethanol is more expensive to produce, but does have the advantage of being able to be produced near petroleum refineries, thus reducing transport costs, compared to other sources of ethanol.

Keywords: Resource/Energy; Economics; and; Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 28
Date: 2003
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/15808/files/sr03-003.pdf (application/pdf)

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:ags:misssr:15808

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.15808

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Staff Reports from Mississippi State University, Department of Agricultural Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().