IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hhs/umnees/0736.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Economics of Biofuels

Author

Listed:
  • Brännlund, Runar

    (Department of Economics, Umeå University)

  • Kriström, Bengt

    (Department of Forest Economics)

  • Lundgren, Tommy

    (Umeå School of Business)

  • Marklund, Per-Olov

    (Department of Economics, Umeå University)

Abstract

Biofuels are increasingly being regarded as an energy source with potential to address problems in several areas, such as those found in the areas of climate change, environmental degradation, energy supply and energy security. We take a look at biofuels through the lens of modern resource economics and begin our survey by asking the question: Why biofuels? We delimit ourselves to biofuels for transportation (e.g. ethanol and biodiesel). We then review some of the literature in the field and put forward a framework for analysis drawn mainly from the green accounting literature. The literature review indicates that the effects of policies promoting conversion from fossil fuels to biofuels are not necessarily welfare improving. Our theoretical framework provided sheds some light on why this might be the case. We propose policies that not only penalize emissions of CO2 from all sources, but also stimulate biomass growth. We end by identifying issues for further research.

Suggested Citation

  • Brännlund, Runar & Kriström, Bengt & Lundgren, Tommy & Marklund, Per-Olov, 2008. "The Economics of Biofuels," Umeå Economic Studies 736, Umeå University, Department of Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:hhs:umnees:0736
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Bayramoglu, Basak, 2008. "Efficiency of a Biofuel Subsidy Policy in the Presence of Environmental Externalities," 2008 International Congress, August 26-29, 2008, Ghent, Belgium 44399, European Association of Agricultural Economists.
    2. Eriksson, Mathilda, 2016. "The Role of the Forest in Climate Policy," Umeå Economic Studies 927, Umeå University, Department of Economics.
    3. Lundgren, Tommy & Marklund, Per-Olov, 2011. "Assessing the welfare effects of promoting biomass growth and the use of bioenergy – A simple back-of-an-envelope calculation," CERE Working Papers 2011:11, CERE - the Center for Environmental and Resource Economics.
    4. Brännlund Runar & Carlén Ola & Lundgren Tommy & Marklund Per-Olov, 2012. "The Costs and Benefits of Intensive Forest Management," Journal of Benefit-Cost Analysis, De Gruyter, vol. 3(4), pages 1-25, December.
    5. Henk Folmer, 2009. "OPEC versus Kyoto by Henk Folmer," CESifo Forum, ifo Institute - Leibniz Institute for Economic Research at the University of Munich, vol. 10(3), pages 23-29, October.
    6. Eriksson, Mathilda & Brännlund, Runar & Lundgren, Tommy, 2018. "Pricing forest carbon: Implications of asymmetry in climate policy," Journal of Forest Economics, Elsevier, vol. 32(C), pages 84-93.
    7. Tuohy, Aidan & Bazilian, Morgan & Doherty, Ronan & Gallachóir, Brian Ó & O'Malley, Mark, 2009. "Burning peat in Ireland: An electricity market dispatch perspective," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 37(8), pages 3035-3042, August.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Biofuels; ethanol; green accounting; energy demand;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • Q42 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Energy - - - Alternative Energy Sources
    • Q54 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Environmental Economics - - - Climate; Natural Disasters and their Management; Global Warming

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hhs:umnees:0736. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: David Skog (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/inumuse.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.