KDF Search Results

This spreadsheet serves as an Input file to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory's Waste-to-Energy System Simulation (WESyS) model developed in Stella Pro (isee systems, Lebanon, NH). WESyS is a national-level system dynamics model that simulates energy production from three sectors of the U.S. waste-to-energy industry: landfills, confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs), and publically owned treatment works (POTWs).

The Regional Feedstock Partnership (the Partnership) has published a report to summarize its accomplishments from 2008–2014. DOE’s Bioenergy Technologies Office (BETO) partnered with the Sun Grant Initiative and Idaho National Laboratory to co-author this report.

The 2016 Billion-Ton Report: Advancing Domestic Resources for a Thriving Bioeconomy is the third in a series of Energy Department national assessments that have calculated the potential supply of biomass in the United States. The report concludes that the United States has the future potential to produce at least one billion dry tons of biomass resources (composed of agricultural, forestry, waste, and algal materials) on an annual basis without adversely affecting the environment.

Water sustainability is an integral part of the environmental sustainability. Water use, water quality, and the demand on water resource for bioenergy production can have potential impacts to food, feed, and fiber production and to our social well-being. With the support from United State Department of Energy, Argonne National Laboratory is developing a life cycle water use assessment tool for biofuels production at the national scale with multiple spatial resolutions.

The use of plant biomass for energy has existed since humans mastered the use of fire, although utilization beyond the open fire has evolved. The concept of using recent biomass as a major energy feedstock is being revisited, driven by high consumer demand (growing population), declining domestic oil supplies, increasing cost of fossil fuels, and a desire to curb the emission of greenhouse gases (Johnson et al., 2007b).

This review on research on life cycle carbon accounting examines the complexities in accounting for carbon emissions given the many different ways that wood is used. Recent objectives to increase the use of renewable fuels have raised policy questions, with respect to the sustainability of managing our forests as well as the impacts of how best to use wood from our forests. There has been general support for the benefits of sustainably managing forests for carbon mitigation as expressed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007.

Indicators are needed to assess environmental sustainability of bioenergy systems. Effective indicators
will help in the quantification of benefits and costs of bioenergy options and resource uses. We identify
19 measurable indicators for soil quality, water quality and quantity, greenhouse gases, biodiversity, air
quality, and productivity, building on existing knowledge and on national and international programs
that are seeking ways to assess sustainable bioenergy. Together, this suite of indicators is hypothesized

United States is experiencing increasing interests in fermentation and anaerobic digestion processes for the production of biofuels. A simple methodology of spatial biomass assessment is presented in this paper to evaluate biofuel production and support the first decisions about the conversion technology applications. The methodology was applied to evaluate the potential biogas and ethanol production from biomass in California and Washington states. Solid waste databases were filtered to a short list of digestible and fermentable wastes in both states.

Meeting the Energy Independence and Security Act (EISA) renewable fuels goals requires development
of a large sustainable domestic supply of diverse biomass feedstocks. Macroalgae, also known as
seaweed, could be a potential contributor toward this goal. This resource would be grown in marine
waters under U.S. jurisdiction and would not compete with existing land-based energy crops.
Very little analysis has been done on this resource to date. This report provides information needed for an

A Workshop for Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and their collaborators was held on September 10-11, 2009 at ORNL. The informal workshop focused on “Sustainability of Bioenergy Systems: Cradle to Grave.” The topics covered included sustainability issues associated with feedstock production and transport, production of biofuels and by-products, and delivery and consumption by the end users.

We quantify the emergence of biofuel markets and its impact on U.S. and world agriculture for the coming decade using the multi-market, multi-commodity international FAPRI (Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute) model. The model incorporates the trade-offs between biofuel, feed, and food production and consumption and international feedback effects of the emergence through world commodity prices and trade.

A working paper review of current approaches to accounting for indirect land-use changes in green house gas balances of biofuels. This report reviews the current effort made worldwide to address this issue. A
description of land-use concepts is first provided (Section 2) followed by a classification of
ILUC sources (Section 3). Then, a discussion on the implications of including ILUC
emissions in the GHG balance of biofuel pathways (Section 4) and a review of methodologies
being developed to quantify indirect land-use change (Section 5) are presented. Section 6

When we think about sustainable bioenergy feedstocks in the United States, we ask ourselves what we will grow, where we will grow it, and how much we will grow. We also must consider the local as well as the broad-scale implications. From the perspective of landscape ecology, we tend to look at the broader scales. It is one of the big challenges of bioenergy, not just looking at what happens to the local farmer but thinking about broader implications. From a global perspective, we also need to ask the same questinos, how much, what type and where?

The Biomass Program is one of the nine technology development programs within the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE) at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). This 2011 Multi-Year Program Plan (MYPP) sets forth the goals and structure of the Biomass Program. It identifies the research, development, demonstration, and deployment (RDD&D) activities the Program will focus on over the next five years, and outlines why these activities are important to meeting the energy and sustainability challenges facing the nation.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) are both strongly committed to expanding the role of biomass as an energy source. In particular, they support biomass fuels and products as a way to reduce the need for oil and gas imports; to support the growth of agriculture, forestry, and rural economies; and to foster major new domestic industries — biorefineries — making a variety of fuels, chemicals, and other products.

Fertilizers used to increase the yield of crops used for food or bio-based products can migrate through the environment and potentially cause adverse environmental impacts. Nitrogen fertilizers have a complex biogeochemical cycle. Through their transformations and partitioning among environmental compartments, they can contribute to eutrophication of surface waters at local and regional scales, groundwater degradation, acid rain, and climate change.

A series of life cycle assessments (LCA) have been conducted on biomass, coal, and natural gas systems in order to quantify the environmental benefits and drawbacks of each. The power generation options that were studied are: (1) a biomass-fired integrated gasification combined cycle (IGCC) system using a biomass energy crop, (2) a direct-fired biomass power plant using biomass residue, (3) a pulverized coal (PC) boiler representing an average U.S. coal-fired power plant, (4) a system cofiring biomass residue with coal, and (5) a natural gas combined cycle power plant.

An analysis was performed at NREL to examine the global warming potential and energy balance of power generation from fossil and biomass systems including CO2 sequestration. To get the true environmental picture, a life cycle approach, which takes into account upstream process steps, was applied. Each system maintained the same constant generating capacity and any lost capacity due to CO2 sequestration was accounted for by adding power generation from a natural gas combined-cycle system. This paper discusses the systems examined and gives the net energy and GWP for each system.

The generation of electricity, and the consumption of energy in general, often result in adverse effects on the environment. Coal-fired power plants generate over half of the electricity used in the U.S., and therefore play a significant role in any discussion of energy and the environment. By cofiring biomass, currently-operating coal plants have an opportunity to reduce the impact they have, but to what degree, and with what trade-offs? A life cycle assessment (LCA) has been conducted on a coal-fired power system that cofires wood residue.

It is technically feasible to capture CO2 from the flue gas of a coal-fired power plant and various researchers are working to understand the fate of sequestered CO2 and its long term environmental effects. Sequestering CO2 significantly reduces the CO2 emissions from the power plant itself, but this is not the total picture.