Mahmoud Salari
Texas Tech University, United States of America
Title: The effect of changing ethanol production on the area harvested and CO2 emissions
Biography
Biography: Mahmoud Salari
Abstract
Biofuel production has been increasing dramatically in the last decade. Recently several countries have introduced mandates and targets for ethanol expansion. This paper investigates the recent developments in ethanol production and its impact on the area harvested and CO2 emissions for the producer countries and the rest of the world. This paper defines three scenarios that examined 50%, 100% and 150% increasing ethanol production respectively in the world which are modeled in GTAP-BIO. The results show that the increasing production of ethanol has different impacts on the area harvested and CO2 emissions in different areas. In all defined scenarios, the largest change is related to the amount of cereal grains. The findings demonstrate that increasing ethanol production from biofuels resulted in CO2 emission mitigation in the producers’ countries and increasing CO2 emissions in the rest of the world. This paper shows increasing ethanol production resulted in CO2 emission mitigation for the United States, while observing reduction in the CO2 emissions for the whole economy.