Introduction

Abstract

During recent decades, we have witnessed unprecedented expansion and intensification in land areas for biomass production around the world (Murphy et al. 2011; Taheripour and Tyner 2013; Taheripour et al. 2017). This worldwide pursuit for biofuels can be largely attributed to a thirst for cleaner fuels, global warming concerns and legislative mandates on transportation biofuels. Many countries have established policies to support and regulate the production and use of biofuels from biomass feedstocks (Havlík et al. 2011). For example, the U.S. Renewable Fuel Standards mandates at least 136 billion liter of liquid fuels to be blended into transportation fuels by 2022, and the current EU Renewable Energy Directive (RED) endorsed a mandatory target of a 10% share of biofuels in the transport petrol and diesel consumption by 2020. Moreover, to mitigate indirect land use change (iLUC) risks from dedicated non-food crops grown on existing agricultural land used for food and feed productions, the share of energy from biofuels produced from cereal and other starch-rich crops, sugars and oil crops and from crops grown as main crops primarily for energy purposes on agricultural land shall be no more than 7% of the final consumption of energy in transport in the EU in 2020. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)’s billion ton study (BTS) provides the most recent estimates of potential biomass that could be used for industrial biofuel production (U.S. DOE 2016).