October 2002: An assessment of biofuel use in the developing world

Biofuels use in the developing world can be divided into woodfuel use and burning of agricultural residue and dung.  The top figure presents our assessment of woodfuel use in the developing world as distributed using a log scale on a 1^o x 1^o spatial grid.  The second figure provides a similar distribution for combustion of residue and dung biofuels.  Both figures show that biofuel use in the developing world correlates most closely with population density.  Of the 2060 Tg biofuel burned, the majority (66%) is burned in Asia, with 21% burned in Africa and 13% burned in Latin America.  While woodfuels are heavily used in China, India, and Southeast Asia, they are also the biofuel of choice in densely populated regions of Africa, especially the west coast and Eastern Highland countries.  In contrast, agricultural residues and dung make up only 33% of biofuels in the developing world.  Regions of China and India have high use of agricultural residues as biofuels where woodfuels are scarce.  Agricultural waste is used in much lesser amounts in Africa and Latin America, with the exception of sugar cane residue (bagasse) used as agroindustrial fuel in Latin America.

Maps of trace gas emissions from biofuel burning in the developing world were generated by applying emission factors to the amount of dry matter burned.  Emissions of CO from biofuel use total about 156 Tg, approximately 50% of estimated global CO emissions from fossil fuel and industry.  These emissions are included in the GEOS-CHEM global 3D model of tropospheric chemistry.  More information is included in the full report of Yevich and Logan [submitted to GBC, 2002].