Allocation of Energy Use in the Biomass-based Fuel Ethanol System and Its Use in Decision Making

The Chinese government is developing biomass ethanol as one of its automobile fuels for energy security and environmental improvement reasons. The energy efficiency of the biomass-based fuel ethanol is critical issue. To investigate the energy use in the three biomass-base ethanol fuel systems, energy content approach, Market value approach and Product displacement approach methods were used to allocate the energy use based on life cycle energy assessment. The results shows that the net energy of corn based, wheat based, and cassava-based ethanol fuel are 12S43MJ, 10299MJ and 13112MJ when get one ton biomass-based ethanol, respectively, and they do produce positive net energy.