The UK has a relatively small area of land available for the growth of fuel crops compared with that of other countries that might promote their use more aggressively. This stands true for countries such as France, Canada, USA, Brazil and Australia to name a few. We found Austria, which leads Europe with its promotion and use of biofuels, was able to include a 2% mandatory adding of biofuels due to the fact that this only amounted to 70,000 tonnes. For the UK, this equivalent amount would be around 350,000 tonnes and would be considerably harder to achieve.

Another factor is weather, warmer climates can produce greater yields. Brazil is an example of this where sugar cane is grow in vast amounts to produce bioethanol, this make production far more economically viable.

While the UK does have an amount of available land which has been set aside, this is still not enough to satisfy a sufficient substitution with conventional fuels (see quantitative section). This is why the market penetration of introducing biofuels would only equal 3.5% of total.

Using bioethanol does seem more acceptable than biodiesel as a intermediate replacement to petrol due to the fact that it can be derived from more raw materials than biodiesel and thus better yields can be gathered and monoculture can be avoided. Europe has adopted a more pro-biodiesel policy due to the higher number of diesel vehicle to petrol vehicle ratio.

Perhaps a better use of the land would be to produce fast growing wood such as short rotation coppice. This fuel can be combusted directly to create electricity or heat, or liquid and gas fuels could be produced through Anaerobic Digestion, Pyrolysis or destructive distillation.