New Study Breaks Link Between Land Use, Biofuels

DomesticFuel.com
Posted by Joanna Schroeder – May 16th, 2011

In a new study released today by Michigan State University (MSU), biofuel production in the United States through 2007, “probably has not induced any indirect land use change.” The report was conducted by Seungdo Kim and Bruce Dale, both MSU scientists, and the results will be published in the next issue of the Journal of Biomass and Bioenergy. ILUC is the theory that any acre used in the production of feedstocks for biofuels in the U.S. results in a new acre coming into food or feed production somewhere else in the world.

Dale and Kim empirically tested whether indirect land use change (ILUC) occurred through 2007 as a result of the expansion of the U.S. biofuels industry, spurred in part by the Renewable Fuels Standard (RFS2) that calls for 36 billion gallons of renewable fuel to be blended in fuel supplies by 2022. The researcher’s derived their conclusion after studying historical data on U.S. croplands, commodity grain exports to specific regions and land use trends in these geographical regions.

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