This study analyses and compares all standards and certification schemes for biofuels production that were approved to comply with the EU RED requirements. The study compared all of the EU-recognized schemes for certifying the sustainability of biofuels which had been established as of June, 2013. Measuring these 13 standards and certification schemes against WWF’s sustainability criteria revealed each standard’s overall added sustainability value and identified areas for improvement.
Filter by Category
Filter by Keywords
Filter by Lab
Filter by Organization
KDF Search Results
Indicators of the environmental sustainability of biofuel production, distribution, and use should be selected, measured, and interpreted with respect to the context in which they are used. The context of a sustainability assessment includes the purpose, the particular biofuel production and distribution system, policy conditions, stakeholder values, location, temporal influences, spatial scale, baselines, and reference scenarios.
Funded from the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, Bioenergy Technologies Office.
Eucalyptus is a fast-growing tree native to Australia and could be used to supply biomass for bioenergy and other purposes along the coastal regions of the southeastern United States (USA). At a farmgate price of $66 dry Mg−1, a potential supply of 27 to 41.3 million dry Mg year−1 of Eucalyptus could be produced on about 1.75 million ha in the southeastern USA. A proposed suite of indicators provides a practical and consistent way to measure the sustainability of a particular situation where Eucalyptus might be grown as a feedstock for conversion to bioenergy.
Funded from the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, Bioenergy Technologies Office.
Foreword: Governments and the private sector are increasingly aware of the need to pursue sustainability for biomass. Over the past decades many criteria have been drawn up, mandatory or criteria in voluntary standard systems or in public-private agreements. As pressure on the earth’s ecosystems is mounting, putting all these criteria into practice is becoming increasingly urgent. Implementing certified sustainable production is one of the good governance measures needed to attain sustainability in value chains.
Corn (Zea mays L.) stover is a potential bioenergy feedstock, but little is known about the impacts of reducing stover return on yield and soil quality in the Northern US Corn Belt. Our study objectives were to measure the impact of three stover return rates (Full (~7.8 Mg ha−1 yr−1), Moderate (~3.8 Mg ha−1 yr−1) or Low (~1.5 Mg ha yr−1) Return) on corn and soybean (Glycine max. L [Merr.]) yields and on soil dynamic properties on a chisel-tilled (Chisel) field, and well- (NT1995) or newly- (NT2005) established no-till managed fields.
A global energy crop productivity model that provides geospatially explicit quantitative details on biomass
potential and factors affecting sustainability would be useful, but does not exist now. This study describes a
modeling platform capable of meeting many challenges associated with global-scale agro-ecosystem modeling.
We designed an analytical framework for bioenergy crops consisting of six major components: (i) standardized
natural resources datasets, (ii) global field-trial data and crop management practices, (iii) simulation units and
Funded from the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, Bioenergy Technologies Office.
Potential global biodiversity impacts from near-term gasoline production are compared to biofuel, a renewable liquid transportation fuel expected to substitute for gasoline in the near term (i.e., from now until c.
Funded from the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, Bioenergy Technologies Office.
The Bioenergy Technologies Office hosted a workshop on Incorporating Bioenergy into Sustainable Landscape Designs on June 24-26 in partnership with Argonne and Oak Ridge National Laboratories. Landscape design offers a promising means for sustainably increasing bioenergy production while maintaining or enhancing other ecosystem services.
Funded from the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, Bioenergy Technologies Office.
The Bioenergy Technologies Office hosted two workshops on Incorporating Bioenergy into Sustainable Landscape Designs with Oak Ridge and Argonne National Laboratories. The first workshop focused on forestry landscapes and was held in New Bern, NC, from March 4-6, 2014. The second workshop focused on agricultural landscapes and was held in Argonne, IL, from June 24-26, 2014. Landscape design offers a promising means for sustainably increasing bioenergy production while maintaining or enhancing other ecosystem services.
Funded from the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, Bioenergy Technologies Office.
The Bioenergy Technologies Office hosted a workshop on Incorporating Bioenergy into Sustainable Landscape Designs on March 4-6 in partnership with Oak Ridge and Argonne National Laboratories. Landscape design offers a promising means for sustainably increasing bioenergy production while maintaining or enhancing other ecosystem services.
Funded from the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, Bioenergy Technologies Office.
The Department of Energy (DOE) Bioenergy Technologies Office held a workshop on "Social Aspects of Bioenergy" on April 24, 2012, in Washington, D.C., and convened a webinar on this topic on May 8, 2012. The workshop addressed questions about how to measure and understand the social impacts of bioenergy production based on a set of social sustainability indicators for bioenergy that were developed by Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
Funded from the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, Bioenergy Technologies Office.
The expansion of biofuel production can lead to an array of negative environmental impacts. Therefore, the European Union (EU) has recently imposed sustainability criteria on biofuel production in the Renewable Energy Directive (RED). In this article, we analyse the effectiveness of the sustainability criteria for climate change mitigation and biodiversity conservation. We first use a global agriculture and forestry model to investigate environmental effects of the EU member states National Renewable Energy Action Plans (NREAPs) without sustainability criteria.
Net benefits of bioenergy crops, including maize and perennial grasses such as switchgrass, are a function of several factors including the soil organic carbon (SOC) sequestered by these crops. Life cycle assessments (LCA) for bioenergy crops have been conducted using models in which SOC information is usually from the top 30 to 40 cm. Information on the effects of crop management practices on SOC has been limited so LCA models have largely not included any management practice effects.
Weighing contrasting evidence is an integral element of science (Osborne 2010). The dominant forum
for doing this and for scientific exchange in general is the peer-review and publication process. It tends
to be slow because of the time required to conduct critical reviews. Rapid exchange and discourse, in
the form of a live debate, can also move science forward.
Abstract: Unfavorable weather can significantly impact the production and provision of agriculture-based biomass feedstocks such as Miscanthus and switchgrass. This work quantified the impact of regional weather on the feedstock production systems using the BioFeed modeling framework. Weather effects were incorporated in BioFeed by including the probability of working day (pwd) parameter in the model, which defined the fraction of days in a specific period such as two weeks that were suitable for field operations.
Understanding the environmental effects of alternative fuel production is critical to characterizing the sustainability of energy resources to inform policy and regulatory decisions. The magnitudes of these environmental effects vary according to the intensity and scale of fuel production along each step of the supply chain. We compare the spatial extent and temporal duration of ethanol and gasoline production processes and environmental effects based on a literature review and then synthesize the scale differences on space-time diagrams.
Indicators of the environmental sustainability of biofuel production, distribution, and use should be selected, measured, and interpreted with respect to the context in which they are used. The context of a sustainability assessment includes the purpose, the particular biofuel production and distribution system, policy conditions, stakeholder values, location, temporal influences, spatial scale, baselines, and reference scenarios.
The increasing demand for bioenergy crops presents our society with the opportunity to design more sustainable landscapes. We have created a Biomass Location for Optimal Sustainability Model (BLOSM) to test the hypothesis that landscape design of cellulosic bioenergy crop plantings may simultaneously improve water quality (i.e. decrease concentrations of sediment, total phosphorus, and total nitrogen) and increase profits for farmer-producers while achieving a feedstock-production goal.
The objective of this paper is to provide a review on the latest developments on the main initiatives and approaches for the sustainability certification for biofuels and/or bioenergy. A large number of national and international initiatives lately experienced rapid development in the view of the biofuels and bioenergy targets announced in the European Union, United States and other countries worldwide.
The objective of this paper is to give a comprehensive review of initiatives on biomass certification from different viewpoints of stakeholders, including national governments (such as The Netherlands, the UK, Belgium and Germany), the EC, NGOs, companies, and international bodies up until October 2007. Furthermore, opportunities and restrictions in the development of biomass certification are described, including international trade law limitations, lack of adequate methodologies, stakeholder involvement requirements and certification costs.