BIOENERGY FOR EUROPE: WHICH ONES FIT BEST?

7.1 Country specific life cycle comparisons 123
Human toxicity – France
m 3 eq. / MJ useful energy
The toxicological impact of a substance is measured in relation to how many m 3 of the
environmental medium (air, water or soil) will bring the emission to a level with no toxic
effect.
175000
150000
125000
100000
75000
50000
25000
0
Triticale
3350 are substracted due to
system expansion
Biofuel: Processing & Utilisation
Biofuel: Agriculture part
Fossil fuel life cycle
Agricultural reference system
Hard coal
RME
Diesel
4050 are substracted due to
system expansion
SME
Diesel
ETBE
MTBE
Miscanthus
Natural gas
Straw
Natural gas
Concerning human toxicity, except for Miscanthus and straws, there is no significant difference between
biofuels and their respective fossil equivalents. For RME, SME and ETBE, it ranges between 0
and 8 % more than diesel or MTBE, and for triticale it's 25 % more than for hard coal, but very low
values in comparison to other chains. For the biofuels used to produce heat, the human toxicity is significantly
higher than that natural gas, which is the best fossil source of energy concerning this impact.
Conclusion
In comparison with fossil energy, all the bioenergy chains represent a significant advantage in term of
global impact: resources depletion such as primary energy, global warming potential. This advantage is
higher with biomass as raw material for electricity and heat than with liquid biofuels. But liquid biofuels
are today the single source of energy for transportation. The advantage of bioenergy at the global
scale is sometimes weighted by the local or regional impacts such as eutrophication or acidification. In
terms of environment, the use of bioenergy is prevailing on an optimum between global and local impacts
on environment. Moreover, these different impacts represent a partial view of the environmental
impacts such as landscape, which are directly related to the spatial distribution of the energy crops at
the national scale and land use.