ABSTRACT
Bioenergy crops competing for land and processing facilities competing for feedstock will affect the optimal structure of a scaled-up biofuel industry within a given region. This chapter highlights the challenges and opportunities for commercial-scale feedstock production from agricultural crops, and presents a novel approach for discovering and designing optimally linked bioenergy crop and conversion process deployment strategies for application at regional scales. Specifically, it describes the potential use of competition-based ecological conceptual frameworks to model the scaling-up process for biofuel production and to identify beneficial levels of diversity for bioenergy crops and conversion processes. The chapter discusses a set of contrasting scenarios that can identify the potential impacts of different land use structures, number and distribution of bioenergy crops, and number and distribution of conversion processes within a region. Data required for this modeling approach would include agricultural yields, conversion efficiencies, and process breakeven capacities.
