Dutch scientists from the Department of Water Engineering Management and the Laboratory of Thermal Engineering at the University of Twente (Netherlands) recently published a report which explored the "Water Footprint" (WF) of bioenergy produced from crops that are commonly used by many countries. The report defined the "Water Footprint" (WF) to be the "volume of freshwater used for [bioenergy] production at the place where it was actually produced". The units of the WF used in the study were in terms of cubic meters of water per Giga-joule of bioenergy. Bioenergy may be in the form of electricity, heat and biofuels (ethanol/biodiesel, all biomass-derived). The crops mentioned in the study were: barley, cassava, maize, potato, rapeseed, rice, rye, sorghum, soybean, sugar beet, sugar cane, wheat, and jatropha. These are some of the findings: (1) the WF of electricity production from biomass (bioelectricity) is smaller than the WF of biofuel production (by a factor of 2); (2) bioethanol production has a smaller WF compared to biodiesel production, (3) jatropha has a large WF at 600 cubic meters per Giga-joule, (4) the lowest WF for bioethanol production can be obtained from the following crops: sugar beet, potato, sugarcane. The complete report is published in a recent issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (URL above)..