Economic Assessment of Producing Corn and Cellulosic Ethanol Mandate on Agricultural Producers and Consumers in the United States

Table 1

Description of the biofuel production scenarios under the base case where no conservation reserve program land returns to crop production.

Scenario	Explanation
0 + 16	Zero billion gallons of grain ethanol and sixteen billion gallons of biomass ethanol
16 + 16	Sixteen billion gallons each of grain ethanol and biomass ethanol
0 + 20	Zero billion gallons of grain ethanol and twenty billion gallons of biomass ethanol
16 + 20	Sixteen billion gallons of grain ethanol and twenty billion gallons of biomass ethanol

The scenarios are slightly different from the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) mandate. The RFS mandate requires production of 36 billion gallons of renewable fuels by 2022, with 15 billion gallons of grain ethanol, 20 billion gallons of biomass ethanol, and one billion gallons of biodiesel. Due to lack of reliable estimates in the literature on biomass to biodiesel conversion, it was reasonable to assume that the additional one billion gallons of ethanol in the RFS mandate is supplied through corn ethanol.