KDF Search Results

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Human actions are altering the terrestrial environment at unprecedented rates, magnitudes, and spatial scales. Landcover change stemming from human land uses represents a major source and a major element of global environmental change. Not only are the global-level data on landuse and land-cover change relatively poor, but we need a much better understanding of the underlying driving forces for these changes. Many forces have been proposed as significant, but single-factor explanations of land transformation have proved to be inadequate.

We present a system dynamics global LUC model intended to examine LUC attributed to biofuel production. The model has major global land system stocks and flows and can be exercised under different food and biofuel demand assumptions. This model provides insights into the drivers and dynamic interactions of LUC, population, dietary choices, and biofuel policy rather than a precise number generator.

The Census of Agriculture, taken every five years, is a complete count of U.S. farms and ranches and the people who operate them. The Census looks at land use and ownership, operator characteristics, production practices, income and expenditures. For America’s farmers and ranchers, the Census of Agriculture is their voice, their future and their responsibility.

The estimation of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from a change in land-use and management resulting from growing biofuel feedstocks has undergone extensive – and often contentious – scientific and policy debate. Emergent renewable fuel policies require life cycle GHG emission accounting that includes biofuel-induced global land-use change (LUC) GHG emissions. However, the science of LUC generally, and biofuels-induced LUC specifically, is nascent and underpinned with great uncertainty.

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.

Provides a summary of the key findings of the IPCC Special Report on Renewable Energy Sources (SRREN) and Climate Change Mitigation.

The IPCC SRREN report addresses information needs of policymakers, the private sector and civil society on the potential of renewable energy sources for the mitigation of climate change, providing a comprehensive assessment of renewable energy technologies and related policy and financial instruments. The IPCC report was a multinational collaboration and synthesis of peer reviewed information: Reviewed, analyzed, coordinated, and integrated current high quality information.

Gridded Population of the World, Version 3 (GPWv3) consists of estimates of human population for the years 1990, 1995, and 2000 by 2.5 arc-minute grid cells and associated datasets dated circa 2000. The data products include population count grids (raw counts), population density grids (per square km), land area grids (actual area net of ice and water), mean administrative unit area grids, centroids, a national identifier grid, national boundaries, and coastlines.

The Global Rural-Urban Mapping Project (GRUMP), Alpha Version consists of estimates of human population for the years 1990, 1995, and 2000 by 30 arc-second (1km) grid cells and associated datasets dated circa 2000. The data products include population count grids (raw counts), population density grids (per square km), land area grids (actual area net of ice and water), mean geographic unit area grids, urban extents grids, centroids, a national identifier grid, national boundaries, coastlines, and settlement points.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is promoting the development of ethanol from lignocellulosic feedstocks as an alternative to conventional petroleum-based transportation fuels. DOE funds both fundamental and applied research in this area and needs a method for predicting cost benefits of many research proposals. To that end, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has modeled many potential process designs and estimated the economics of each process during the last 20 years. This report is an update of the ongoing process design and economic analyses at NREL.