Although the United States has pursued rapid development of corn ethanol as a matter of national biofuel policy, relatively little is known about this policy's widespread impacts on agricultural land conversion surrounding ethanol refineries. This knowledge gap impedes policy makers' ability to identify and mitigate potentially negative environmental impacts of ethanol production. We assessed changes to the landscape during initial implementation of the Renewable Fuel Standard v2 (RFS2) from 2008 to 2012 and found nearly 4.2 million acres of arable non-cropland converted to crops within 100 miles of refinery locations, including 3.6 million acres of converted grassland. Aggregated across all ethanol refineries, the rate of grassland conversion to cropland increased linearly with proximity to a refinery location. Despite this widespread conversion of the landscape, recent cropland expansion could have made only modest contributions to mandated increases in conventional biofuel capacity required by RFS2. Collectively, these findings demonstrate a shortcoming in the existing 'aggregate compliance' method for enforcing land protections in the RFS2 and suggest an alternative monitoring mechanism would be needed to appropriately capture the scale of observed land use changes.
Natural Resources Research Institute (NRRI), University of Minnesota Duluth, 5013 Miller Trunk Highway, Duluth, MN, 55811, United States of America;Author to whom any correspondence should be addressed.;National Wildlife Federation, 1990 K Street NW, Suite 430, Washington, DC, 20006, United States of America;Nelson Institute Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment (SAGE), University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1710 University Avenue, Madison, WI, 53726, United States of America;Nelson Institute Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment (SAGE), University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1710 University Avenue, Madison, WI, 53726, United States of America
Recommended Citation:
Christopher K Wright,Ben Larson,Tyler J Lark,et al. Recent grassland losses are concentrated around U.S. ethanol refineries[J]. Environmental Research Letters,2017-01-01,12(4)