Can biofuels find the path to petroleum parity?byMark BüngerPublished: 2010-06-02
While the technical and cost potential of bio-products to compete with petroleum grows, can they match its giant scale? Mark Bünger explains why massively ramping up output will be the biggest challenge for bioenergy.
Petroleum-based products such as fuels and plastics are vilified for their economic and environmental drawbacks. Businesses, scientists and governments are urgently seeking a reliable supply of affordable fuels and industrial materials, and a reduction in the amount of carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere, and are looking to bio-based products to deliver them.
However, even as they seek to mitigate its drawbacks, they want to match oil’s primary benefit – the availability of a large quantity of versatile, valuable material.
To date, most biofuels and biomaterials developers have focused on lab- and demo-scale studies to improve performance and reduce cost so they can compete with petroleum products, and those goals are coming within sight.
But in order to truly replace petroleum-based fuels and materials, they would need to reach petroleum parity, meaning that they were competitive on physical properties, cost, and scale. When investigating whether bio-based products can match or beat petroleum on these three measures, Lux Research reached a number of key findings.
Viable Bio-Based Alternatives Already Exist
Bio-based alternatives exist that can substitute for 92% of petroleum’s products. Today, biomaterials and biofuels replace just 0.2% of petroleum products such as gasoline, diesel, and polyethylene. But technology exists to manufacture thousands of petroleum-based products from biomass. In principle, many more of the fuels and materials we derive from petroleum today could be replaced by bio-based alternatives like biopolypropylene, biobutanol, and biocrude.
Below: Companies such as DuPont are developing biobutanol processes
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