Life cycle analyst Don O’Connor presented some of his assessments of indirect land use and how it could impact the biodiesel industry during Tuesday’s general session at the National Biodiesel Conference.
O’Conner says that life cycle assessment is a very challenging and complicated process. “The first thing that is important is that life cycle analysis needs to be relative,” O’Connor said. “The question for alternative fuels is should we be compared against the average of all petroleum or against the incremental or marginal supply of petroleum, and that is one of the issues that is not being properly addressed.”
Another big issue is transparency and a third issue he addressed was the priority of scientific approach. He believes that the bottom line is that there is lots of potential for increasing the amounts of soybeans or rapeseed being produced in the world on the same amount of land and the United States can be a leader for other nations to do so.
Listen to O’Connor’s presentation here: [audio:http://www.zimmcomm.biz/nbb/nbb-09-oconnor.mp3]