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MASS tree planting across Australia’s farmlands could provide feedstock to supply 90% of the nation’s transport fuel by 2030. That’s the major finding of a new study by former CSIRO scientist Barney Foran, now a visiting fellow at Charles Sturt University, which has several campuses in regional Australia.

Foran’s project, Transition to a bio-fuel economy, assessed the prospects of bio-methanol and bio-ethanol to replace oil-based fuels, comparing them with natural gas and shale oil. The study found that deriving bio-methanol from wood feedstocks was “proven feasible”. To maintain the 90% supply of transport fuels by 2051 would require up to 60m ha of current farmland being turned to wood production, with plantings limited to 30% of any region or farm.

Water taken up by the new forests of pine, native eucalypt and mallee species would decrease total annual national runoff by up to 12,000 Gl, a volume Foran acknowledges is large in relation to currently-managed water but about 3% of total estimated runoff.

The study found that producing bio-ethanol from wood and waste feedstock has similar feasibility to bio-methanol but the technology is immature and would require more arable land. Best-case bio-fuel scenarios could avoid up to 4b t/y of CO₂ emissions out to 2051. Replacing oil-based fuels with compressed natural gas would avoid 700m t/y of emissions over that time while current shale oil technology using above-ground retorts would increase emissions by more than 8b t/y.

The study, which also modelled the use of wood as a feedstock for distributed electricity generation, was funded through R&D corporation Land and Water Australia, which will close at the end of this year after losing funding in Australia’s latest federal budget.