How much of the UK's arable land will be needed to make it's biofuel?
According to this story on today's BBC news website the UK government is set to mandate the proportion of ethanol in standard petrol is increased from 5% to 10%. The 5% grade is known as E5 and the new grade will be known as E10. So, how much of the UK's arable land would be needed to make this, if it were made here? The article says " Ethanol is a kind of alcohol manufactured from plants, including sugar beet and wheat ". Since sugar beet can be grown successfully in the UK, and it has a higher ethanol yield than wheat per square metre, I'm going to assume that we make the ethanol entirely from sugar beet. So let's see if we can work out what proportion of the UK's 60,000 sq km arable land would be needed to power 10% of it's vehicle miles: In [ 1 ]: beet_ton_per_sq_km_per_year = 1320 In [ 2 ]: litre_biofuel_per_ton_beet = 108 In [ 3 ]: litre_biofuel_per_sq_km_per_year = beet_ton_per_sq_km_per_year*litre_biofuel_per_ton_beet In [ 4 ]: gallon_b