This paper analyses the potential biomass supply in the 15 EU countries, 8 new member states and 2 candidate countries (ACC10), plus Belarus and the Ukraine. For this purpose five scenarios were designed to describe the short-, moderate- and long-term potential of biomass-for-energy. Our assessments show that under certain restrictions on land availability, the potential supply of biomass energy amounts to up to 12.8 EJy-1 in the EU15 and 6.1 EJy-1 in the ACC10. For comparison, the overall energy supply in the EU15 totalled 62.6 EJy-1 in 2001. Consequently, there are no important resource limitations in meeting the biomass target for 2010, which was set by the European Commission (5.6 EJy-1 for the EU15 according to the 1997 White Paper on Renewable Energy Sources (RES)). However, given the slow implementation of the RES policy it is very unlikely that the biomass target will be met within 2010
