Assessing the potentials for nonfood crops

Given the ambitious EU targets to further decarbonize the economy, it can be expected that demand for lignocellulosic biomass will continue to grow. Provisioning of part of this biomass by dedicated biomass crops becomes an option. This chapter presents yields and cost levels that can be reached in Europe with different perennial crops in different climatic, soil, and management situations. The AquaCrop model developed by FAO was used and fed with phenological parameters per crop and detailed weather data to simulate the crop growth in all European NUTS3 regions. Yield levels were simulated for a maximum and a water limited yield situation and further converted to match with low, medium, and high input management systems. Low input systems are suitable for the lower quality soils often characterized as “marginal” because of their low suitability to be used for annual (rotational) cropping. In addition, suitability maps specific per crop were prepared according to important limiting factors such as killing frost, length of growing season, and slope. The cost productions were assessed with an activity-based costing (ABC) model, developed to assess the roadside Net Present Value (NPV) cost per ton of biomass. The yield, crop suitability, and cost simulation results were then combined to identify the best performing crop–management mix per region