Expanding regional resources and infrastructure for the production of biofuels is essential to support congressionally mandated biofuel production goals, according to a report –– "A USDA Roadmap to Meeting the Biofuels Goals of the Renewable Fuels Standard by 2022" –– issued recently by USDA.
The report outlines capacity for growing and processing the crops that can be used to produce ethanol or biodiesel. It also called for a large increase in biofuel production plants and for investments in the infrastructure necessary to transport the fuel and make it available for consumers. And, the report attempts to cast biofuel development as a regional development issue capable of stimulating lagging regional economies.
USDA also casts the biofuel production "problem" in terms of the billions of dollars in new investments that will be required to meet the renewable fuels standard mandated by Congress, rather than the difficulty in developing the necessary technology. Nevertheless, says USDA, the RFS is attainable. The standard would require the U.S. transportation fuel supply to include 36 billion gallons of ethanol or other renewable fuels by 2022, of which 21 billion gallons must be derived from cellulosic sources or biomass, such as switchgrass or crop residues.
According to the report, "the United States will soon have the installed capacity to produce up to the 15.0 billion gallons of corn-starch ethanol that is allowed by" the renewable fuels standard. Additionally, the " U.S. biofuels industry is on track to produce 1 billion gallons of biodiesel by 2022."
While most of the funding for the new refineries is expected to come from private investment, there "are a number of potential barriers and bottlenecks in the current ethanol use supply chain," the report said. "While we expect that market to respond to the infrastructure needs of a growing industry, we recognize that the path from production to actual consumption presents challenges that will need to be anticipated and addressed."
Those challenges include increasing the maximum percentage of ethanol blended with traditional fuel, increasing the number of fuel pumps that allow consumers to purchase biofuel blends, and increasing the number of trains available to transport biofuels. The entire report, in PDF format, can be found at this Web site.
