Climate notes: Biofuels catch up worldwide

There have been negative headlines for biofuels recently not only because of the problems during the introduction of E10 - super-grade petrol with a 10 percent ethanol content but above all also as part of the discussion of the competition with food production. Nevertheless, fuel produced from plants continues to make advances worldwide. This article gives an overview of the production and sales of biofuels. By 2009 worldwide ethanol production had quadrupled within ten years; the worldwide biodiesel production increased ten-fold between 2001 and 2007, increasing by 51 percent between 2004 and 2009. Presently, biofuels have a 3 percent share in global fuel consumption in transportation and could achieve a 27 percent share of fuel consumption of all types of transport according to scenarios of the International Energy Agency by 2050; this, however, only with the large-scale use of procedures that are still not commercially available today.