Biofuels from lignocellulosic biomass : a multi-criteria approach for comparing overall concepts

Globally, due to rising mobility in the future, the fuel demand will continue to increase significantly. Thus, in addition to other options, like efficiency increase, traffic reduction and relocation of transportation tasks as well as electro mobility, biofuels are strongly required to cover at least part of the expected additional fuel consumption in the years to come. But the respective options are controversially discussed. Thus, for benchmarking different biofuel options and concepts, a methodical approach for the technical, economic and environmental analysis and evaluation of future biofuel concepts has been developed. This easily transferable multi-criteria approach is based on technical development prospects along the overall fuel supply chain and applied for selected biofuel options (i.e. ethanol, Fischer-Tropsch diesel, synthetic natural gas) based on lignocelluloses’ biomass (i.e. willow as short rotation crop) provided in Central Europe. For each of these investigated biofuel options, reference concepts are developed relevant for the short, medium and long term taking into account detectible technical development prospects. They are analysed and evaluated according to selected technical, economic and environmental parameters. Finally, an overall assessment is done for all concepts.