Life-Cycle Environmental and Economic Decision-Making for Alternative Biofuels
Principal Investigator: Arpad Horvath, UC Berkeley
Co-PI: Thomas McKone, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Faculty Collaborators: Maximilian Auffhammer, Peter Berck, Tim Lipman, Daniel Kammen, William Nazaroff, Margaret Torn
Postdocs: Umakant Mishra, Nick Santero
Research Associates: Eric Masanet, Agnes Lobscheid
Graduate Students: Catherine Almirall, Audrey Barrett, Matt Bomberg, Kevin Fingerman, Calanit Saenger, Corinne Scown, Bret Strogen, Joshua Apte, Ted Huynh, Omer Shalev
Undergraduate Student: Norman Wen
Successful deployment of biofuels requires research to overcome
technical barriers in the path from sunlight to fuels via biological
systems. However, there are other
barriers that can often impose constraints more challenging than those related
to technical feasibility. These are the constraints imposed by cost, resource
limitations, health risks, climate impacts, and nutrient-cycle disruption, among
others. Addressing the world’s need for near-term, cost-effective, and reliable
technologies for biofuels requires research to address in parallel technical,
social, economic, and environmental barriers.
The extraction,
production, and utilization of fossil-based transportation fuels have major
health and environmental consequences. In the search for carbon-neutral
alternatives to petroleum, biofuels have emerged as a technologically feasible
option. But current methods to measure, evaluate, and regulate the ecological
and human health impacts of biofuels are inadequate. Because transportation
fuels are so heavily used and because the environmental consequences of the
current system are so large, it is inevitable that a transformation from
petroleum-based transportation fuels to one heavily dependent on biofuels would
be accompanied by significant changes in environmental impacts associated with
the transportation sector. These changes may improve or degrade conditions
relative to the current state. To enable
choices that will make conditions better, this program carries out research to
anticipate the nature and scale of the changes that may result in advance of
large-scale deployment of biofuels.
Research Overview
The
specific aims of this program are to develop and apply methods to study the
life-cycle health, environmental, resource, and economic impacts and
performance of the various pathways from biomass to fuel use. This program will
produce a comprehensive framework for assessing both the benefits and impacts
of biofuel technologies for environmental quality, human health, natural
resources, and local, regional and global economies. This effort includes
methods development, data collection, information management, and
decision-support tools.
We are
considering a range of likely biomass feedstocks and a portfolio of biofuels.
During the first three years, we will focus our efforts on a) cane sugar +
cellulose ethanol, b) corn starch + cellulose ethanol, c) corn starch +
cellulose second-generation fuels (SGF), d) other cellulosic crops to produce
ethanol, and e) other cellulosic crops to produce SGF. We also plan to devote some level of effort
to address vegetable-oils-to-biodiesel and algal-oils-to-biodiesel pathways. In
this summary, the term “biofuels” refers to these options.
Research Program
Our
research program focuses on methods to study the life-cycle environmental,
human health, and economic feasibility and performance of the various pathways
from biomass to fuel use, including life-cycle assessment (LCA) techniques,
life-cycle costing and economic analysis, and human health and ecological
impact assessment. We are studying the air and water quality, land use, and
human health and ecological impacts that arise from the life cycle of biofuels
– from biomass growing through fuels production and distribution to fuels use
in transportation (passenger and freight, on-road and off-road mobile sources,
trains, ships, aircraft) and stationary (electricity generation, space heating)
applications. We conduct this research in cooperation with the other EBI
programs and projects that identify the biological, ecological, and
technological alternatives for producing biofuels. We are currently addressing
the following six research areas:
1)
Biomass production;
2)
Biofuel production;
3)
Biofuel distribution and storage;
4) Air
emissions from the life-cycle of biofuels;
5) Human
and ecological health impact analysis; and
6)
Economic analyse.
The
integral relationships among these areas are illustrated in the figure below.
2009 Program Update:
The specific aim of this program is to develop and apply life-cycle assessment methods to understand the overall health, environmental, resource, and economic impacts and performance of the various pathways from biomass to fuels. The long-term goal of this effort is to enable the appropriate use of biofuels based on scientific insights, metrics, and tools to understand the conditions that make biofuels sustainable. During the last year we have developed much greater geographic resolution for exploring changes that arise from large-scale deployment of biofuels. We have applied this capacity to a case study for Illinois and Indiana, but with an eye on the entire United States. For the Illinois-Indiana case study, we have determined how the carbon-equivalent footprint and human health impacts change in a transition from existing petroleum refining to large-scale biofuel production. The EBI bioenergy analysts assisted our effort with an optimum series of biofuel production scenarios.
We have now compiled in a single framework the life-cycle external costs, carbon footprint, ecological damage, and human health burdens that accrue from each of the biofuel life stages: feedstock production, biofuel production, transportation and storage, and fuel use. We then allocated impacts to specific counties and aggregated them nationally to express impact per vehicle kilometer of travel or gasoline-liter equivalent. In the next steps, life-cycle impacts will be compared to a range of alternative fuels (such as petroleum gasoline, oil-sands gasoline, etc.) and the Illinois-Indiana case study will be expanded to the full U.S.
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