Can we make enough biofuel to fuel air travel as well as road transport?
Global capacity for biofuel production currently stands at around 670,000 barrels per day: 36.5 billion litres of bioethanol and 4 billion litres of biodiesel. This represents around 1% of the total global transport fuel market. In the UK in 2006, biofuels contributed around 1.2% of road transport fuel consumption. Therefore the current goal is to replace a higher percentage of the world’s fossil fuel consumption with biofuels; our current use of biofuel is a drop in the ocean. Therefore, the development of a biofuel for aviation at this stage is somewhat irrelevant in terms of reducing total greenhouse gas emissions from the transport sector. Because production capacity is currently limited, fuel produced for aviation would displace production capacity for road fuels: therefore the overall gain in emissions savings could be zero. However, as biofuel production capacities expand, and as 2nd generation technologies are introduced, the production of aviation biofuels may become viable. T
