Abstract
The economic impact of obtaining biomass could become significant to U.S. rural economies via the establishment of a bioeconomy. In 2023, the Bioenergy Technologies Office (BETO) and Oak Ridge National Laboratory provided a road map to obtain over a billion tons of biomass for conversion to bioenergy and other products. Using information from this roadmap, this study estimates the potential positive and negative economic impacts that occur because of land use change, along with increased technological advances. This is achieved by using the input–output model, IMPLAN, and impacting 179 Bureau of Economic Analysis regions in the conterminous United States. Biomass included in the analysis comprises dedicated energy crops, crop residues, and forest residues. The analysis found that managing pastures more intensively could result in releasing land to produce dedicated energy crops on 30.8 million hectares, resulting in the production of 361 million metric tons of biomass. This, coupled with crop residues from barley, corn, oats, sorghum, and wheat (162 million metric tons), plus forest residues (41 million metric tons), provide 564 million dry metric tons of biomass. Assuming the price for biomass in 2023 dollars was USD 77 per dry metric-ton, this additional production results in an economic benefit for the nation of USD 619 billion, an increase from the Business As Is scenario (Baseline) of almost USD 100 billion per year, assuming a mature biomass industry. An additional 700,000 jobs are required to grow, harvest/collect, and transport the biomass material from the land.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 2081 |
| Journal | Energies |
| Volume | 18 |
| Issue number | 8 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Apr 2025 |
Funding
This material is based upon work supported by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) Bioenergy Technologies Office under Award Number DE-AC05-00OR22725. This research was funded by Oak Ridge National Laboratory, funding provided by the Bioenergy Technologies Office of the U.S. Department of Energy UT-Battelle, LLC, under contract DE-AC05-00OR22725, Oklahoma State University Ag Research; U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA)—Agriculture and Food Research Initiative (AFRI) Grant #2023-67023-39036; this work is also supported by NIFA Hatch project accession number 1024362, project number TEN00574 from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendation in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the view of the project funders. This manuscript has been authored by UT-Battelle, LLC, under contract DE-AC05-00OR22725 with the US Department of Energy (DOE). The US government retains and the publisher, by accepting the work for publication, acknowledges that the US government retains a non-exclusive, paid-up, irrevocable, world-wide license to publish or reproduce the submitted manuscript version of this work, or allow others to do so, for US government purposes. DOE will provide public access to these results of federally sponsored research in accordance with the DOE Public Access Plan ( https://energy.gov/doe-public-access-plan ). This work may be reused—either in full or in part—without restriction, provided that the original source is acknowledged.
Keywords
- ForSEAM
- IMPLAN
- POLYSYS
- billion-ton report
- biomass
- economic impacts
- simulation