Environmental Assessment of Wood-Based Biofuel Production and Consumption Scenarios in Norway

In Norway, the boreal forest offers a considerable resource base, and emerging technologies may soon make it commercially viable to convert these resources into low-carbon biofuels. Decision makers are required to make informed decisions about the environmental implications of wood biofuels today that will affect the medium-and long-term development of a wood-based biofuels industry in Norway. We first assess the national forest-derived resource base for use in biofuel production. A set of biomass conversion technologies is then chosen and evaluated for scenarios addressing biofuel production and consumption by select industry sectors. We then apply an environmentally extended, mixed-unit, two-region input-output model to quantify the global warming mitigation and fossil fuel displacement potentials of two biofuel production and consumption scenarios in Norway up to 2050. We find that a growing resource base, when used to produce advanced biofuels, results in cumulative global warming mitigation potentials of between 58 and 83 megatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalents avoided (Mt-CO2-eq.-avoided) in Norway, depending on the biofuel scenario. In recent years, however, the domestic pulp and paper industry-due to increasing exposure to international competition, capacity reductions, and increasing production costs-has been in decline. In the face of a declining domestic pulp and paper industry, imported pulp and paper products are required to maintain the demand for these goods and thus the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of the exporting region embodied in Norway's pulp and paper imports reduce the systemwide benefit in terms of avoided greenhouse gas emissions by 27%.