15. National Strategy Options for Japan

The introduction and diffusion of biofuel industry have been promoted in many developed countries including Japan, which has established concrete mandates with numerical targets for both bioethanol and biodiesel. Table 15.1 shows changes to the biofuel introduction targets in Japan. In response to government requests to achieve the GHG emission reduction goals of the Kyoto protocol, the Petroleum Association of Japan has agreed to blend 840,000 kl/year of bio-ETBE (ethyl tertiary-butyl ether), equivalent to 210,000 kl of crude oil, into gasoline starting in fiscal year (FY) 2010. This blended bio-ETBE gasoline has been sold as “biogasoline,” and the number of service stations selling it has increased from 50 in 2007 to 3210 in 2012. On the other hand, Japan’s Ministry of the Environment (MOE) has been promoting a strategy to accelerate the use of biomass energy by supplying E3 gasoline, a blend of gasoline with 3% bioethanol. Demonstration projects for E3 have been conducted in Osaka, Tokyo, and Okinawa, but the amount of E3 gasoline sold in 2010 remained approximately 28,000 kl.

A number of studies have evaluated how achieving these mandates can contribute to reductions in GHG emissions and how the expansion of biofuel production can affect food security. However, there are few studies focusing on the interlinkages between different impacts, including trade-offs and synergies among different types of impacts. This chapter quantitatively assesses various environmental impacts by expanding biofuel production and ethanol usage and analyzes the interlinkages among different impacts under several options for introducing biofuel in Japan. We use three indicators for this analysis, life-cycle carbon footprint (LCCO₂), water footprint (WF), and ecological footprint (EF), by considering feedstock types, changes in land use, imports, and environmental conditions as well as domestic supply capacity and national mandates. Based on the analysis, we end the discussion with policy implications of moving toward sustainable biofuel.

Available future scenarios were reviewed for transportation usage of bioethanol and biodiesel. The national targets for bioethanol (Table 15.2) were set on the basis of Public Notice No. 242 issued by the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry (METI) in 2010. The biodiesel targets in Table 15.2 followed the targets set by the MOE in 2006, but we modified them by shifting 5 years ahead from the original targets (i.e., interpreting the 2030 MOE target as the 2035 target for this analysis) because the actual diffusion of biodiesel has been delayed.

For analyzing each scenario, five options were prepared by considering the type of biomass, producer country, associated land use changes, competition with respect to food production, supply pattern, and transportation (Figs. 15.1 and 15.2).

We used three assessment indicators: carbon footprint (CF), WF, and EF. CFs and WFs for biofuel derived from different crops were collected extensively and reviewed to identify differences among biomass sources. The maximum supply capacities of domestic options such as rice straw ethanol and waste cooking oil were calculated on the basis of domestic production and consumption of each biomass source (Table 15.3). Due to the variation in CF and WF values within the same biomass source, we used both upper-end and lower-end values as best case and worst case while calculating EF. Table 15.4 summarizes the domestic biofuel ratio (%) of each case and the target year. Unless Japan cannot expand the maximum supply capacity of the domestic options (Table 15.3), the domestic biofuel ratio will decrease owing to the increase in imported biofuel, which is necessary to fill the gap between domestic production and the targets, as described in Table 15.2.

An integrated sustainability assessment model of biofuel that uses several biomass sources was developed in this chapter. Figure 15.10 summarizes the results of the scenario analysis, which uses six different cases to achieve Japan’s national target for bioethanol and biodiesel. This figure suggests that Japan needs to import more than 40 % of its bioethanol to achieve the national target in 2035, except in case 6 (maximizing domestically produced bioethanol) (Fig. 15.10a). Similarly, Japan needs to import at least 59 % of its total biodiesel to achieve the 2035 target (Fig. 15.10b). In general, a dependency on the imported biofuel or a self-sufficiency in biofuel production has an influence on the level of EF_total.

This assessment model can provide not only the overall ecological footprint for each case but also a detailed breakdown of EF_cf, EF_harvest, and EF_water. This allows us to identify relationships across these indicators. For example, Fig. 15.11 indicates the linkage between EF_cf and EF_harvest in six bioethanol cases, which suggests that EF_cf in general increases EF_harvest, but we can find different paths (regression lines) with steeper slopes, such as case 6, and those with moderate slopes, such as cases 1, 2, and 4. This means that the same reduction in GHG emission results in different levels of EF_harvest depending on the case chosen by the government. It is highly recommended that the government applies multi-criteria sustainability assessment as demonstrated by this chapter in addition to conventional cost-benefit analysis prior to making a policy decision to expand biofuel production and import.