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Can biofuels make us energy independent?

No. In fact, the United States and Europe will have to import biofuels to displace just 10% of their annual petroleum consumption. As Charlotte Hebebrand and Kara Laney explain in An Examination of U.S. and EU Government Support for Biofuels: Early Lessons, p. 13:

Using production projections from the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the EU’s Direcorate General for Agriculture, the International Energy Agency predicts that at least 20 percent of the crop land in both locations would be necessary to supply just five percent of domestic fuel needs by 2010…To meet the EU’s biofuels target of 10 percent by 2020, 38 percent of EU cropland would have to be devoted to biofuels.  According to the IEA, displacing 10 percent of fossil fuel use for transport in the United States would require more than two-thirds of U.S. cropland for a yield of only 30-billion gallons of biofuels … Unless the United States and the EU were to sacrifice food production in favor of biofuels, they cannot meet their proposed mandates through domestic production alone–even if the amount of land used, crop yields, and production efficiencies were sharply increased.



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