Biofuels

About the Resources:

The ITRC’s Biofuels Team developed Technical and Regulatory Guidance, BIOFUELS-1. The Guidance document introduces biofuels, defining the scope of the potential environmental challenges by introducing biofuel fundamentals, current regulatory status, and future usage projections. The remainder of the guidance focuses on the differences between biofuels and conventional fuels, emphasizing how the differences can be used to evaluate potential biofuel release scenarios, release prevention, emergency response, fate and transport, site characterization, hazard evaluation, and remediation strategies.

Team Background:

When the team was formed, biofuels and biofuel blends were a relatively new category of renewable transportation fuels and are defined as liquid fuels, where blending components produced from renewable biomass feedstocks are used as alternative or supplemental fuels for internal combustion engines. Furthermore, their manufacture and consumption were increasing, in part, due to usage mandates and incentives both in the United States and abroad. The expanded use of biofuel and biofuel blends increased the potential frequency of releases due to their increased manufacture, transportation, storage, and distribution. Because biofuels differ from conventional fuels with respect to their physical, chemical, and biological properties, their introduction posed challenges with respect to understanding the potential impacts of releases on the environment. Specifically, once released into the environment, these fuels will exhibit different environmental behaviors compared to conventional fuels that are either already known and documented in literature or reasonably projected based on their physical, chemical, and biological properties.