IEA Bioenergy Task 39 - An Examination of the Potential for Improving Carbon/Energy Balance of Bioethanol

The energy balance and greenhouse gas emissions of biofuels remain a controversial topic in the popular press, with government policy makers, and within the academic community. Most of the discussion is based on the existing (or past) performance of biofuel technologies and therefore may not be representative of future developments in the industry. The energy balance and life cycle greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of corn ethanol plants have been extensively studied and reported on and there is a wide variety of results that have been published. This work has concentrated on that technology, and an effort to determine if one of the reasons for the variation might be that the data that others have used has been from different periods of time and if that has any influence on the wide range of results that are present.