In view of the shortage of fossil energy and the environmental pollution, the clean, low-carbon and renewable liquid biofuel offers as an important alternative of the fossil fuel. For the huge population and the limited cultivated land resources, it is necessary to develop non-grain energy crops on a marginal land to produce the liquid biofuel in China. The marginal land resources for three representative raw crops including the sweet sorghum, the cassava and the rape are estimated in this paper. The multi-factor analysis method and the dynamic threshold method are adopted to evaluate the marginal land resources. An optimized non-grain planting mode is to be adopted in order to provide an important support for planning the cultivation of the non-grain energy plants and the liquid biofuel industry. It is shown that the area of the marginal land resources suitable for the sweet sorghum, the cassava planting and the winter fallow fields suitable for the rape planting in China are about 34.69, 21.66, 19.95 million ha, respectively. The total area of the marginal land suitable for the development of the liquid biofuel is about 59.98 million ha.

marginal land  /  liquid biofuel  /  energy crops  /  winter fallow fields