Grand Challenges for Life-Cycle Assessment of Biofuels

McKone, Thomas E.; Nazaroff, William W.; Berck, Peter; Auffhammer, Maximilian; Lipman, Timothy; Torn, M. S.; Masanet, Eric; Lobscheid, Agnes; Santero, Nicholas J; Mishra, Umakant; Barrett, A. P.; Bomberg, Matthew; Fingerman, Kevin; Scown, Corinne D.; Strogen, Bret; Horvath, Arpad

doi:10.1021/es103579c

Cited by 151 publications

(121 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…Estimates of the magnitude of ILUC emissions vary owing to both model parameter choices and model structure [3,4], and different studies have produced a wide range of results [5,6]. The uncertainty surrounding ILUC emissions challenges regulators who must make and defend specific choices within this range of alternatives.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Carbon Accounting and Economic Model Uncertainty of Emissions from Biofuels-Induced Land Use Change

Plevin

Beckman

Golub

et al. 2015

Environ. Sci. Technol.

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Few of the numerous published studies of the emissions from biofuels-induced "indirect" land use change (ILUC) attempt to propagate and quantify uncertainty, and those that have done so have restricted their analysis to a portion of the modeling systems used. In this study, we pair a global, computable general equilibrium model with a model of greenhouse gas emissions from land-use change to quantify the parametric uncertainty in the paired modeling system's estimates of greenhouse gas emissions from ILUC induced by expanded production of three biofuels. We find that for the three fuel systems examined-US corn ethanol, Brazilian sugarcane ethanol, and US soybean biodiesel-95% of the results occurred within ±20 g CO2e MJ -1 of the mean (coefficient of variation of 20-45%), with economic model parameters related to crop yield and the productivity of newly converted cropland (from forestry and pasture) contributing most of the variance in estimated ILUC emissions intensity. Although the experiments performed here allow us to characterize parametric uncertainty, changes to the model structure have the potential to shift the mean by tens of grams of CO2e per megajoule and further broaden distributions for ILUC emission intensities.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Carbon Accounting and Economic Model Uncertainty of Emissions from Biofuels-Induced Land Use Change

Plevin

Beckman

Golub

et al. 2015

Environ. Sci. Technol.

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“…McKone et al (2011) elaborated on the grand challenges for life-cycle assessment of biofuels that resulted from ''research planning and progress meetings of the Life-Cycle Program of the Energy Biosciences Institute at the University of California, Berkeley '' (McKone et al 2011, p. 1). Mönch et al (2011) called for research on the grand challenges for discrete event logistics systems in a special issue of the journal Computers in Industry.…”

Section: On Grand Challenges Of Scientific Disciplinesmentioning

confidence: 99%

In Search of Information Systems (Grand) Challenges

et al. 2015

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The paper reports on the results of a Delphi study with 143 information systems (IS) academics that was designed to explore what IS academics perceive to be the grand challenges of the IS discipline. The results provide evidence that the scholarly IS discipline is still much concerned with itself, for instance, in terms of its identity, relevance, foundational theory, or methodological pluralism -suggesting that the old debate on IS identity is not yet overcome. It thus cannot be claimed that the study identifies the grand challenges of the discipline -still it becomes noticeable that the academic community sees potentials for the IS discipline to have societal impact. A total of 21 challenges are identified, of which six challenges are categorized as ''meta challenges for further developing the IS discipline'' and the remaining 15 challenges are categorized as ''IS research challenges'' pertaining to sociotechnical systems, IS infrastructures, society and ecology, as well as social well-being and affectivity. We provide a ranking of all challenges according to their relevance, potential impact, and possible time frame of realization. The results have some important implications for IS as a discipline as well as its prospective future societal role. It is hoped that through our study we can contribute to the important debate on the challenges of the academic IS discipline.

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“…Although widely used, process LCA suffers from many limitations including the use of an arbitrary life cycle boundary, combining data in disparate units and at multiple spatial and temporal scales, dealing with high dimensionality data involving varying degrees of uncertainty, and dealing with processes having a range of emissions [11]. Furthermore, for a system that simultaneously produces multiple products and coproducts these is no universally accepted method as to how to apportion the environmental impacts amongst said products.…”

Section: Process Lcamentioning

confidence: 99%

Design of Sustainable Biofuel Processes and Supply Chains: Challenges and Opportunities

et al. 2015

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Abstract:The current methodological approach for developing sustainable biofuel processes and supply chains is flawed. Life cycle principles are often retrospectively incorporated in the design phase resulting in incremental environmental improvement rather than selection of fuel pathways that minimize environmental impacts across the life cycle. Further, designing sustainable biofuel supply chains requires joint consideration of economic, environmental, and social factors that span multiple spatial and temporal scales. However, traditional life cycle assessment (LCA) ignores economic aspects and the role of ecological goods and services in supply chains, and hence is limited in its ability for guiding decisionmaking among alternatives-often resulting in sub-optimal solutions. Simultaneously incorporating economic and environment objectives in the design and optimization of emerging biofuel supply chains requires a radical new paradigm. This work discusses key research opportunities and challenges in the design of emerging biofuel supply chains and provides a high-level overview of the current "state of the art" in environmental sustainability assessment of biofuel production. Additionally, a bibliometric analysis of over 20,000 biofuel research articles from 2000-to-present is performed to identify active topical areas of research in the biofuel literature, quantify the relative strength of connections between various biofuels research domains, and determine any potential research gaps. OPEN ACCESSProcesses 2015, 3 635

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Grand Challenges for Life-Cycle Assessment of Biofuels

Cited by 151 publications

References 15 publications

Carbon Accounting and Economic Model Uncertainty of Emissions from Biofuels-Induced Land Use Change

Carbon Accounting and Economic Model Uncertainty of Emissions from Biofuels-Induced Land Use Change

In Search of Information Systems (Grand) Challenges

Design of Sustainable Biofuel Processes and Supply Chains: Challenges and Opportunities

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