IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/ecolec/v112y2015icp45-52.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Carbon, climate, and economic breakeven times for biofuel from woody biomass from managed forests

Author

Listed:
  • Withers, Mitch R.
  • Malina, Robert
  • Barrett, Steven R.H.

Abstract

Woody biomass harvested from old-growth forests results in a significant “carbon debt” when used as a feedstock for transportation fuel. This is because previously stored forest carbon is released to the atmosphere as CO2. The debt is eventually repaid provided that the life cycle CO2 emissions of the biofuel are lower than the conventional fuel that is displaced. Managed forests are an alternative to old-growth forests with the potential to reduce the carbon debt associated with woody biomass-derived fuels. This work is the first to quantify the carbon debt incurred by transportation biofuels derived from woody biomass from managed forests. The breakeven time of this carbon debt is computed along with breakeven times for radiative forcing, temperature change, and economic damages. In the case of biofuel production for 30years, we find that breakeven times for carbon, radiative forcing, and temperature change are 59, 42, and 48years, respectively. If cumulative economic damages are computed for discount rates of 1–2%, the breakeven time is greater than 100years, while damages never break even at discount rates above 2%. Breakeven times decrease if the prevailing harvest cycle is left unchanged, but increase if biofuel production is sustained indefinitely.

Suggested Citation

  • Withers, Mitch R. & Malina, Robert & Barrett, Steven R.H., 2015. "Carbon, climate, and economic breakeven times for biofuel from woody biomass from managed forests," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 112(C), pages 45-52.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:ecolec:v:112:y:2015:i:c:p:45-52
    DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2015.02.004
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800915000439
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2015.02.004?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Bjart Holtsmark, 2012. "Harvesting in boreal forests and the biofuel carbon debt," Climatic Change, Springer, vol. 112(2), pages 415-428, May.
    2. Sir Nicholas Stern, 2006. "What is the Economics of Climate Change?," World Economics, World Economics, 1 Ivory Square, Plantation Wharf, London, United Kingdom, SW11 3UE, vol. 7(2), pages 1-10, April.
    3. Korobeinikov, A. & Read, P. & Parshotam, A. & Lermit, J., 2010. "Modelling regional markets for co-produced timber and biofuel," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 69(3), pages 553-561, January.
    4. Morgan R. Edwards & Jessika E. Trancik, 2014. "Erratum: Climate impacts of energy technologies depend on emissions timing," Nature Climate Change, Nature, vol. 4(6), pages 518-518, June.
    5. J. Mason Earles & Sonia Yeh & Kenneth E. Skog, 2012. "Timing of carbon emissions from global forest clearance," Nature Climate Change, Nature, vol. 2(9), pages 682-685, September.
    6. Alice Favero & Robert Mendelsohn, 2014. "Using Markets for Woody Biomass Energy to Sequester Carbon in Forests," Journal of the Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, University of Chicago Press, vol. 1(1), pages 75-95.
    7. Havlík, Petr & Schneider, Uwe A. & Schmid, Erwin & Böttcher, Hannes & Fritz, Steffen & Skalský, Rastislav & Aoki, Kentaro & Cara, Stéphane De & Kindermann, Georg & Kraxner, Florian & Leduc, Sylvain & , 2011. "Global land-use implications of first and second generation biofuel targets," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 39(10), pages 5690-5702, October.
    8. Morgan R. Edwards & Jessika E. Trancik, 2014. "Climate impacts of energy technologies depend on emissions timing," Nature Climate Change, Nature, vol. 4(5), pages 347-352, May.
    9. Govinda Timilsina & Simon Mevel, 2013. "Biofuels and Climate Change Mitigation: A CGE Analysis Incorporating Land-Use Change," Environmental & Resource Economics, Springer;European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, vol. 55(1), pages 1-19, May.
    10. Madhu Khanna & Xiaoguang Chen, 2013. "Economic, Energy Security, and Greenhouse Gas Effects of Biofuels: Implications for Policy," American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Agricultural and Applied Economics Association, vol. 95(5), pages 1325-1331.
    11. William D. Nordhaus, 1992. "The 'DICE' Model: Background and Structure of a Dynamic Integrated Climate-Economy Model of the Economics of Global Warming," Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers 1009, Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics, Yale University.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Jiang, Changmin & Yang, Hangjun, 2021. "Carbon tax or sustainable aviation fuel quota," Energy Economics, Elsevier, vol. 103(C).
    2. Randall W. Jackson & Amir Borges Ferreira Neto & Elham Erfanian & Péter Járosi, 2019. "Woody Biomass Processing and Rural Regional Development," Economic Development Quarterly, , vol. 33(3), pages 234-247, August.
    3. Puricelli, S. & Cardellini, G. & Casadei, S. & Faedo, D. & van den Oever, A.E.M. & Grosso, M., 2021. "A review on biofuels for light-duty vehicles in Europe," Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Elsevier, vol. 137(C).
    4. Bentsen, Niclas Scott, 2017. "Carbon debt and payback time – Lost in the forest?," Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Elsevier, vol. 73(C), pages 1211-1217.
    5. Ko, Chun-Han & Chaiprapat, Sumate & Kim, Lee-Hyung & Hadi, Pejman & Hsu, Shu-Chien & Leu, Shao-Yuan, 2017. "Carbon sequestration potential via energy harvesting from agricultural biomass residues in Mekong River basin, Southeast Asia," Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Elsevier, vol. 68(P2), pages 1051-1062.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Laborde, David & Mamun, Abdullah & Martin, Will & Pineiro, Valeria & Vos, Rob, 2020. "Modeling the Impacts of Agricultural Support Policies on Emissions from Agriculture," Conference papers 333141, Purdue University, Center for Global Trade Analysis, Global Trade Analysis Project.
    2. Fernández-Amador, Octavio & Francois, Joseph F. & Oberdabernig, Doris A. & Tomberger, Patrick, 2020. "The methane footprint of nations: Stylized facts from a global panel dataset," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 170(C).
    3. Morgan R. Edwards & Jessika E. Trancik, 2022. "Consequences of equivalency metric design for energy transitions and climate change," Climatic Change, Springer, vol. 175(1), pages 1-27, November.
    4. Magdalena M. Klemun & Morgan R. Edwards & Jessika E. Trancik, 2020. "Research priorities for supporting subnational climate policies," Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 11(6), November.
    5. Weng, Yuwei & Chang, Shiyan & Cai, Wenjia & Wang, Can, 2019. "Exploring the impacts of biofuel expansion on land use change and food security based on a land explicit CGE model: A case study of China," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 236(C), pages 514-525.
    6. Eriksson, Mathilda & Brännlund, Runar & Lundgren, Tommy, 2018. "Pricing forest carbon: Implications of asymmetry in climate policy," Journal of Forest Economics, Elsevier, vol. 32(C), pages 84-93.
    7. Albers, Ariane & Collet, Pierre & Lorne, Daphné & Benoist, Anthony & Hélias, Arnaud, 2019. "Coupling partial-equilibrium and dynamic biogenic carbon models to assess future transport scenarios in France," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 239(C), pages 316-330.
    8. John F. Raffensperger, 2020. "A price on warming with a supply chain directed market," Papers 2003.05114, arXiv.org, revised Mar 2021.
    9. Shen, Yanwen & Linville, Jessica L. & Urgun-Demirtas, Meltem & Mintz, Marianne M. & Snyder, Seth W., 2015. "An overview of biogas production and utilization at full-scale wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) in the United States: Challenges and opportunities towards energy-neutral WWTPs," Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Elsevier, vol. 50(C), pages 346-362.
    10. Dharik S. Mallapragada & Bryan K. Mignone, 2020. "A theoretical basis for the equivalence between physical and economic climate metrics and implications for the choice of Global Warming Potential time horizon," Climatic Change, Springer, vol. 158(2), pages 107-124, January.
    11. Baker, J.S. & Wade, C.M. & Sohngen, B.L. & Ohrel, S. & Fawcett, A.A., 2019. "Potential complementarity between forest carbon sequestration incentives and biomass energy expansion," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 126(C), pages 391-401.
    12. Nathalie Spittler & Ganna Gladkykh & Arnaud Diemer & Brynhildur Davidsdottir, 2019. "Understanding the Current Energy Paradigm and Energy System Models for More Sustainable Energy System Development," Post-Print hal-02127724, HAL.
    13. Pogany, Peter, 2013. "Thermodynamic Isolation and the New World Order," MPRA Paper 49924, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    14. Argueyrolles, Robin & Delzeit, Ruth, 2022. "The interconnections between Fossil Fuel Subsidy Reforms and biofuels," Conference papers 333492, Purdue University, Center for Global Trade Analysis, Global Trade Analysis Project.
    15. Rong Li & Brent Sohngen & Xiaohui Tian, 2022. "Efficiency of forest carbon policies at intensive and extensive margins," American Journal of Agricultural Economics, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 104(4), pages 1243-1267, August.
    16. Waibel, Christoph & Evins, Ralph & Carmeliet, Jan, 2019. "Co-simulation and optimization of building geometry and multi-energy systems: Interdependencies in energy supply, energy demand and solar potentials," Applied Energy, Elsevier, vol. 242(C), pages 1661-1682.
    17. Martin Zapf & Hermann Pengg & Christian Weindl, 2019. "How to Comply with the Paris Agreement Temperature Goal: Global Carbon Pricing According to Carbon Budgets," Energies, MDPI, vol. 12(15), pages 1-20, August.
    18. O. Borodina, S. Kyryziuk, V. Yarovyi, Yu. Ermoliev, T. Ermolieva, 2016. "Modeling local land uses under the global climate change," Economy and Forecasting, Valeriy Heyets, issue 1, pages 117-128.
    19. Sterner, Thomas & Ewald, Jens & Sterner, Erik, 2024. "Economists and the climate," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 109(C).
    20. Batidzirai, B. & Smeets, E.M.W. & Faaij, A.P.C., 2012. "Harmonising bioenergy resource potentials—Methodological lessons from review of state of the art bioenergy potential assessments," Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Elsevier, vol. 16(9), pages 6598-6630.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:ecolec:v:112:y:2015:i:c:p:45-52. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/ecolecon .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.