Last week, DOE released the 2016 Billion-Ton Report: Advancing Domestic Resources for a Thriving Bioeconomy, Volume 1: Economic Availability of Feedstocks (BT16). Jonathan Male, Director of the Bioenergy Technologies Office (BETO), introduced the report, stating:

While bioenergy currently is the greatest single source of renewable energy in the United States, there are still economic and technological barriers that limit efforts to mobilize biomass resources for more biofuels, biopower, and bioproducts. Energy crops in particular are wholly dependent on future market demand.
 
BT16 is not a final answer, but rather a step to help the nation develop strategies for realizing a broader bioeconomy potential. At bioenergykdf.net, the reader can find online companion data sets and interactive visualization for all biomass resources in this report. While we are confident in the rigor and depth of our analysis, the potential implications of our results have only begun to be assessed. We invite the user community to take a step forward and use this report and associated data to perform further analyses, ask more questions, and inform strategies to mobilize national biomass resources toward realization of a bioeconomy.

In addition to identifying potential biomass resources, BT16 addresses key aspects of the bioeconomy, including: economic availability of biomass resources; supply impact of algae, waste, and other energy crops; and economic impacts of transportation costs of feedstocks for biorefineries.