The challenge of forecasting the role of biofuel in EU transport decarbonization at 2050: a meta-analysis review of published scenarios

The European New Green Deal and the REDII set ambitious targets, aiming at achieving Europe climate-neutral by 2050. Transports are the most critical sector to decarbonize, given the rigidity of both the infrastructure and end-use technologies, as well as the challenge of reaching cost-effective production of sustainable advanced renewable fuels. Several researchers, stakeholders, and groups of interest, such as International and Governmental organizations, NGOs, business analysists, scientists and various other actors elaborated own scenarios on biofuels market penetration at 2050. This work presents an extensive literature review of published scenarios, to assess and quantify the different visions from the authors. These forecasts should evaluate the possible future development of the sector based on current and likely future policies, as well as industry and investors’ business plans; at the same time, these estimates should also provide policy makers a sound base for policy development. In this work, a methodology for scenario collection and preliminary screening, based on a set of ex-ante conditions, has been elaborated and applied, in order to identify the most relevant publications and to structure the analysis of collected data. A total of 18 publications were finally selected from the literature review and, out this selected pool, 56 different scenarios were further identified and then examined. This work allowed to draw a summary view of selected scenarios, all focused on biofuel contribution to transport decarbonization in the period 2030 – 2050. The total fuel consumption for transport sector is expected to decline in Europe, and biofuels will contribute significantly to achieve the targets, with a progressive shift towards advanced feedstock. This work analyzed pre-pandemic published scenarios. An already identified effect of the COVID-19 impact on global economy is the postponement of investment decisions in the energy area, which makes the achievement of RED and EU Green Deal targets even more challenging in this historical moment

CHIARAMONTI David;  TALLURI Giacomo;  SCARLAT Nicolae;  PRUSSI Matteo; 

2021-02-04

PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD

JRC121788

1364-0321 (online),   

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364032121000125?via%3Dihub,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC121788,   

10.1016/j.rser.2021.110715 (online),