KDF Search Results

In response to concerns about oil dependency and the contributions of fossil fuel use to climatic change, the U.S. Department of Energy has begun a research initiative to make 20% of motor fuels biofuel based in 10 years, and make 30% of fuels bio-based by 2030. Fundamental to this objective is developing an understanding of feedstock dynamics of crops suitable for cellulosic ethanol production. This report focuses on switchgrass, reviewing the existing literature from field trials across the United States, and compiling it for the first time into a single database.

This report identify the issues associated with intermediate ethanol blends with an emphasis on the end-use or
vehicle impacts of increased ethanol levels and compile a current and complete bibliography of key references on intermediate ethanol blends.

It is expected that international biomass trade will significantly increase in the coming years because of the possibly lower costs of imported biomass, the better supply security through diversification and the support by energy and climate policies of various countries. Concerns about potential negative effects of large-scale biomass production and export, like deforestation or the competition between food and biomass production, have led to the demand for sustainability criteria and certification systems that can control biomass trade.

The EU has set ambitious targets to raise the share of renewable energies, particularly biofuels. With an increasingly controversial public debate and more scientific evidence about the downsites of biofuels, recently the European Unions biofuel targets have been bound to the condition that they have to be produced sustainable. Therefore the European Commission is currently developing sustainability criteria for biofuels.Establishing certification schemes is a possible strategy to ensure that bioenergy crops are produced in a sustainable manner.

The market for E85�a fuel blend of 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline�is small
but growing rapidly. I use data for E85 sales at fueling stations in Minnesota to estimate
demand for E85 as a function of retail E85 and gasoline prices. I find that demand is
highly sensitive to price changes, with an own-price elasticity as high as -13 and a gasolineprice
elasticity as high as 16 at sample mean price levels. Demand is most sensitive to
price changes when the relative price of E85 is at an intermediate level, at which point

While there is an increasing demand for active public involvement in forestry decision-making, there are as yet few successful models for achieving this in the new sustainable forest management (SFM) context. This paper describes the special needs of forest managers conducting participatory SFM planning in a sometimes-polarized public context, and outlines criteria for designing decision-support processes to meet these needs.

Discussions of alternative fuel and propulsion technologies for transportation often overlook the infrastructure required to make these options practical and cost-effective. We estimate ethanol production facility locations and use a linear optimization model to consider the economic costs of distributing various ethanol fuel blends to all metropolitan areas in the United States. Fuel options include corn-based E5 (5% ethanol, 95% gasoline) to E16 from corn and switchgrass, as short-term substitutes for petroleum-based fuel.

Global energy use projections predict that biomass will be an important source of renewable energy in the coming decades. Short-rotation woody crops will be the prime source of this biomass. However, the sustainability of woody crops has been questioned. Using internationally accepted forest sustainability criteria, an assessment of willow biomass crops indicates that they are sustainable compared to agricultural land and the fossil fuel-based energy systems they will replace.

This presentation summarizes findings of a life cycle analysis of the energy and environmental impacts of converting corn stove (the residue from corn harvesting) to ethanol.

There is increasing pressure on the forestry industry to adopt sustainable practices, but a lack of knowledge about how to facilitate this, and how to measure sustainability. This book reviews current thinking about scientifically based indicators, and sustainable management of natural forests and plantations. Information is applicable to boreal, temperate and tropical biomes. The contents have been developed from papers presented at a IUFRO conference held in Australia, in order to develop a state-of the art report on this subject.

Technology for producing transportation fuel from biomass is moving out of the laboratory and into the marketplace. In the past decade, advances in biotechnology have allowed us to reduce the projected cost of bioethanol by nearly 25%.

The need for new criteria and indicators for the assessment of biodiversity conservation as part of sustainable forest management of tropical forests has been identified as a priority by many international organisations. Those biodiversity criteria and indicators which formed part of a much broader initial assessment by the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) (Prabhu et al. 1996) were found to be deficient. This Working Paper contains specific proposals for biodiversity criteria and indicators.

Limited fuel availability is a critical factor in the marketability of new fuels. A survey of us households is used to estimate the value of fuel availability and its influence on choice of fuel for a fuel-flexible vehicle and the choice of a dedicated-fuel engine for a vehicle. The marginal value of availability decreases as the percent of stations offering a new fuel increases. For fuel-flexible vehicles the cost of lack of availability decreases from us $0.35/gallon at 1% to US $0.02/gallon when 50% of stations offer the fuel.

This working paper contains proposals for specific genetic criteria and indicators (C&I) which are expected to be part of a more general set of biological C&I. These proposals are intended for use in guiding tropical forest management but the indicators and verifiers we describe are not in the form of simple prescriptions where a single measurement can be recommended for a single causal effect.

Background: This study evaluates the global economic effects of the current US RFS2, and the potential contribution from advanced biofuels. Results & discussion: Our simulation results suggest that these mandates lead to an increase of 0.21% in the global gross domestic product in 2022, including an increase of 0.8% in the USA and 0.02% in the rest of the world, relative to our baseline no-RFS scenario. The incremental contributions to gross domestic product from advanced biofuels in 2022 are estimated at 0.41 and 0.04% in the USA and the rest of the world, respectively.

A new addition to the growing biofuels resources list at AgMRC is a cellulosic ethanol feasibility template developed by agricultural economists at Oklahoma State University (OSU). The purpose of the spreadsheet-based template is to give users the opportunity to assess the economics of a commercial-scale plant using enzymatic hydrolysis methods to process cellulosic materials into ethanol. The OSU Cellulosic Ethanol Feasibility Template can be downloaded and modified by the user to mimic the basic operating parameters of a proposed ethanol plant under a variety of production conditions.

Traffic flows in the U.S. have been affected by the substantial increase and, as of January 2009, decrease in biofuel production and use. This paper considers a framework to study the effect on grain transportation flows of the 2005 Energy Act and subsequent legislation, which mandated higher production levels of biofuels, e.g. ethanol and biodiesels. Future research will incorporate changes due to the recent economic slowdown.

Ethanol use in the U.S. rose sharply in recent years due to public policy and a spike in petroleum prices, and remains high. Public support for ethanol includes mandated minimum levels of use nationwide. However, rather little is known about consumer demand for ethanol and much less about demand by type of blend and ethanol source. We used trial survey data and conjoint analysis to overcome the lack of historical data on consumers’ preferences for ethanol blend fuels.

This paper examines the possibilities of breaking into the cellulosic ethanol market in south Louisiana via strategic feedstock choices and the leveraging of the area’s competitive advantages. A small plant strategy is devised whereby the first-mover problem might be solved, and several scenarios are tested using Net Present Value analysis.

The Energy Independence and Security Act (EISA) of 2007 established specific targets for the production of biofuel in the United States. Until advanced technologies become commercially viable, meeting these targets will increase demand for traditional agricultural commodities used to produce ethanol, resulting in land-use, production, and price changes throughout the farm sector. This report summarizes the estimated effects of meeting the EISA targets for 2015 on regional agricultural production and the environment. Meeting EISA targets for ethanol production is estimated to expand U.S.