Advantages

Biofuels offer a number of technical and environmental advantages:

• Adding ETBE to gasoline reduces emissions of carbon monoxide (CO) and unburned hydrocarbons. It also reduces the use of aromatic compounds and improves the properties of the gasoline pool, in particular the octane number.
  
• Fatty acid methyl ester (FAME) enhances the lubricating properties of diesel fuel.
  
• Because biofuels are made from renewable raw materials, the only net CO2 emissions generated come from the fossil fuels used to cultivate and process the raw materials. Although their contribution is small, biofuels still permit a net reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.

In addition, biofuels help to protect and create jobs. According to a study by the European Commission, European production of biofuels equivalent to 1% of EU automotive fuel consumption would help to protect and/or create between 45,000 and 75,000 jobs.

 
After JEC WTW Study, February 2007

Drawbacks

However, today’s biofuel process technologies also have a number of structural weaknesses:

• They require resources that have limited agronomic potential (this is particularly true of vegetable oils), entail high production costs and compete for land with other non-substitutable uses, especially food crops. Allocating all the fallow land in the European Union—about 6 million hectares—to biofuel production represents a potential of some 7 to 14 million metric tons a year, or the equivalent of around 2.5 to 5% of the automotive fuel consumed in the EU.
  
• Process technologies—especially the production of ethanol from starch or sugar beets—are characterized by high “field-to-wheel” energy consumption.
  
• The manufacturing cost of biofuels is strongly dependent on the cost of crops and is still much higher than that of petroleum-based automotive fuels (excluding taxation). Tax and regulatory incentives are therefore needed to promote the development of biofuels.