Pathway to a land-neutral expansion of Brazilian renewable fuel production.

Biofuels are currently the only available bulk renewable fuel. They have, however, limited expansion potential due to high land requirements and associated risks for biodiversity, food security, and land conflicts. We therefore propose to increase output from ethanol refineries in a land-neutral methanol pathway: surplus CO2-streams from fermentation are combined with H2 from renewably powered electrolysis to synthesize methanol. We illustrate this pathway with the Brazilian sugarcane ethanol industry using a spatio-temporal model. The fuel output of existing ethanol generation facilities can be increased by 43%-49% or ~100 TWh without using additional land. This amount is sufficient to cover projected growth in Brazilian biofuel demand in 2030. We identify a trade-off between renewable energy generation technologies: wind power requires the least amount of land whereas a mix of wind and solar costs the least. In the cheapest scenario, green methanol is competitive to fossil methanol at an average carbon price of 95€ tCO2-1.

Synthetic hourly electricity load data for the paper and food industries.

The data set includes hourly time series for a period of one year of electricity demand of three different types of industries. The industries include a small food processing company, one small paper industry and one medium-large paper producing company. The data have been synthetized from two years of measured data from industries in Chile using a comprehensive clustering analysis. The synthetic data possess the same statistical characteristics as the measured data but are provided normalized to one kWh and anonymized in order to be used without confidentiality issues. The data were originally used in the associated paper [1] to assess the demand side management potential of the industries but these can be used for further energy system modelling exercises including these types of industries.