Resume

There are many reports on how much biomass could be produced in countries, continents and globally for large-scale bioenergy/biofuel production. However, for the biomass to be used it has to satisfy many criteria. Many of these relate to the need for commercial processes to be profitable or subsidized adequately. For many bioenergy/biofuel production processes some 50% of the total costs lie with biomass production, harvesting and transport to its site of use. Thus the biomass has to be profitably available at scale at the right place or be cheap enough to be transported to the site of use. The biomass also has to be technically suitable for the appropriate downstream process. Thus when considering the amounts of biomass that could be available for bioenergy/biofuel production it is essential to define the criteria that determine whether the biomass can or will be used commercially. Research into increasing the yields per unit area of superior biomass and into making downstream processes ever more efficient will enable more and more biomass to become economically useful for bioenergy/biofuel production. Thus realistic estimates of how much useful biomass can be produced will hopefully increase over time.