Of the biofuels discussed in this section, only biodiesel has reached full com­mercialization and not all of the others have even been tested in pilot plants and demonstration units as a prelude to scale up. Any conclusions as to their impact on fuel usage, the substitution of fossil fuels or reduction in greenhouse gas emissions is consequently highly speculative. Nevertheless, a European consortium of research institutes and university groups from five nations has commenced building advanced biofuels into a comprehensive model of biofuel chain options until 2030, commis­sioned by the European Union to identify a robust biofuels strategy to minimize costs and identify key technological, legislative, and policy developments that are required.140 Among the key preliminary predictions are that:

• Biodiesel and cereal — and sugar-derived bioethanol use in Europe will peak at approximately 10% of total transportation fuels by 2020.

• By 2020, advanced biofuels (including lignocellulosic ethanol) will con­tribute an equal share of total transportation fuels but will peak at no more than 30% by 2050, the maximum being limited by the amount of land avail­able for energy crops.

• The introduction of advanced biofuel options may meet considerable intro­ductory cost barriers.

• Advanced biofuels may require “stepping-stone” strategies (e. g., the short­term development of lignocellulosic biomass supply chains for power gen­eration by cofiring in power generating plants) or realistic synergies (e. g., coproduction of FT diesel and hydrogen for use in fuel cells).

• Commencing by 2020, the use of hydrogen-powered fuel cells is the only route to replacing fossil fuels for 50% or more of light-duty vehicle trans­portation needs.

• For heavy duty trucks, where fuel cells are unlikely to meet the demands for either high continuous loads or in long-distance transport, advanced biofuels may be the long-term market solution.

That biofuels — in particular, ethanol and biodiesel — might only be a transi­tional rather than a lasting solution for sustainable passenger transport is one chal­lenging hypothesis but one with a rival: that globalization of biofuels will lead to a split between the North (the United States, Europe, and Japan) and the South (Latin America, Africa, and South and Southeastern Asia), the former increas­ingly focused on the production of advanced biofuels (including hydrogen-based systems), whereas the South develops a long-term economic strategy based on sugar ethanol and biodiesel, trading internationally and gradually supplanting OPEC.141 Tropical countries “do it better,” that is, can produce ethanol with positive energy gains, because they achieve at least twice the yield per hectare than can be dem­onstrated in temperate countries producing corn — or grain-derived ethanol; as loca­tions for biodiesel crops, locales in the Southern Hemisphere simply cannot be bettered, for land availability, climate, the type of plant species grown or the yields extracted from them — table 6.7 lists recent investment programs in the Southern Hemisphere.142

In this analysis, the status of India and China is ambiguous, straddling the bound­ary between agricultural and industrial nations: both rank in the top 11 of nations with the least car ownership (6 and 11/1000 population, respectively), but both are in

• Innovative heterogeneous catalysts for transesterification reactions in biodiesel production144

• Producing very high quality FT diesel (from fossil sources) to be used in regions with very stringent specifications for diesel fuels and their emis­sions or to upgrade below specification diesels by blending145

• The utilization of (perhaps, unpurified) biomass-generated syngas in fer­mentations to support the production of either ethanol or major commod­ity chemicals146,147

The existing scientific base in OECD economies is, however, most likely to be best employed by successfully defining novel technologies to tackle the dual problems of dwindling oil reserves and out-of-control CO2 emissions. Beyond the second-genera­tion biofuels discussed in this chapter lies a raft of long-considered (sometimes, long — researched) topics, to which — to differing extents — the adjective “speculative” is often applied. All of these have strong biotechnological inputs and can be grouped as the radical options for biofuels.