Global Sustainable Bioenergy Project
Feasibility and Implementation Paths

The GSB Project

The Global Sustainable Bioenergy (GSB) project seeks to contribute to a sustainable world by expanding, disseminating, and applying understanding of the possibility and necessity of producing bioenergy on a very large scale while honoring other priorities. Distinctive features of the project are its global scope and participation as well as a forward-looking approach unconstrained by current practices and trends. Having completed Stage 1 of the project, involving five continental conventions held in 2010, the vision and action plan for Stage 2 is presented.

The objective of Stage 2 of the GSB project is to explore whether and how it is physically possible for bioenergy to sustainably meet a substantial fraction of future demand for energy services – e.g. 150 EJ annually, corresponding to 23% of primary energy supply in the IEA Blue Map Scenario (2010) – while feeding humanity and meeting other needs from managed lands, preserving wildlife habitat, and maintaining environmental quality.

This will be pursued via an interconnected set of tasks addressing potential levers for increasing bioenergy supply, factors that could be either levers or constraints, and potential/perceived showstoppers:

• Pasture intensification, including development of a global pasture productivity model and estimation of the pasture yield gap
• Double crops
• Changed animal feed rations
• Dietary choice and food supply chain efficiency
• Energy crop productivity, including development of a multicrop global energy crop productivity model
• Food security
• Fertilizer demand, residue utilization, and soil fertility
• Integrated analysis

An improved inventory of current land use and characteristics will also be undertaken in order to provide a common reference point for GSB research tasks.

Preliminary analysis suggests that the levers identified for analysis:

• Have gigantic biofuel production potential, with application of single levers in single countries significant relative to global transportation fuel demand
• Have been the subject of little or no detailed analysis to date
• Are usually not considered in the debate over land availability for bioenergy
• Have potential to be "no regrets" options in that they involve currently managed lands with neutral or positive anticipated environmental impacts and increased farm income

If this potential is confirmed upon further analysis during Stage 2, this would likely transform the debate on land availability for sustainable bioenergy production from if to how, and would illuminate desirable paths to a beneficial bioenergy-intensive future.

Results of Stage 2 analysis are expected to provide a valuable, new context for consideration in Stage 3 of transition paths and policies incorporating analysis of macroeconomic, environmental, ethical and equity issues as well as local-scale effects on rural economies. In addition to informing understanding of the role of bioenergy in a global sustainable future, it is hoped that the GSB project will motivate in the near term exemplary projects that tangibly demonstrate the potential of bioenergy to be gracefully and beneficially produced while honoring other land-use priorities.

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