The Effect of Biofuels on the International Oil Market

This paper derives a method to quantify the impact of biofuels on fuel markets, assuming that these markets are dominated by a cartel of oil-rich countries and that fuel prices in these countries are significantly lower than those in the rest of the world. We identify large differences between the effects of introducing biofuels using the proposed method (denoted the cartel-of-nations [CON] model), in contrast to the competitive or the standard cartel models. When compared with the CON model, the competitive model overestimates the reduction in fuel prices and underestimates the reduction in fuel consumption, and therefore the impact of biofuels on greenhouse gases.