Land availability for sugarcane derived jet-biofuels in São Paulo—Brazil

The aviation industry is committed to reducing its environmental impact and has established ambitious goals to decrease CO₂ emissions by 50% by to 2050. The replacement of fossil fuels by jet-biofuels is one of the main strategies to attain the emission targets. Therefore, the aim of this study was to provide a detailed survey on land availability for sugarcane production, one of the most promising feedstock options for jet-biofuels, in the Brazilian state of São Paulo, where the technological resources are concentrated. This analysis was carried out by integrating georeferenced information on land use, protected areas, soil fertility, terrain slope and climatic conditions into a conditional decision support procedure, based on Boolean inference techniques. Our results showed that 3,501,590 ha would be potentially available for sugarcane expansion in the year 2013. Almost 80% of the mapped lands have high economic potential once they are located in a distance lower than or equal to 25 km from the processing units. If properly included in the productive sector, the available lands could increase sugarcane production by 73% in relation to current levels. That could lead to a growth of 147% (20.6 billion liters) in the ethanol production compared to the production obtained in 2015. Nevertheless, long-term policies, logistic improvements and environmental standard definitions on jet-biofuels still remain as major challenges to boost feedstock production, as well as, to implement financial and regulatory measures necessary to promote jet-biofuels production and use