Report Lists "Who's Who" in Global Biofuels

The Bioenergy Site features a global bioenergy report by Heather Youngs, from the Energy Biosciences Institute at the University of California, Berkeley (United States). The report describes countries who are major players in bioenergy. Some highlights of the report are:

(1) Brazil has changed the status of sugar cane ethanol from an agriculture product to a fuel, so bioenergy crop will be regulated now as a strategic fuel rather than an agricultural product; Brazil tightly controls the fuel market;
(2) Sustainability is an issue which has been factored in many national biofuel programs; some countries are reportedly struggling with water deficits (presumably due to increased bioenergy crop cultivations);

(3) biogas (methane and carbon dioxide from the anaerobic microbial conversion of organic wastes) continues to be one biofuel growth area; China and India have good biogas programs for rural/village-scale applications, while Germany leads in large-scale biogas applications with about 4,000 biogas plants;

(4) the United Kingdom is active in renewable fuels, and are "concerned about limited resources for biomass and how they can they proceed in a way that is socially and environmentally sustainable";

(5) the goals of bioenergy programs are country-dependent; for developing countries, the major concern is the enabling of small farmers to provide a basic means for energy access on a daily basis (cooking, heating electricity); for developed countries, the goal is "to meet a volume or percentage requirement from a renewable source".