Proper accounting for time increases crop-based biofuels’ greenhouse gas deficit versus petroleum
By M. O'hare, R. Plevin, Jeremy I. Martin, A. Jones, Alissa Kendall, E. Hopson. 2009
188 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The global warming intensities of crop-based biofuels and fossil fuels differ not only in amount but also in their discharge patterns over time. Early discharges, for example, from market-mediated land use change, will have created more global warming by any time in the future than later discharges, owing to the slow decay of atmospheric CO2. A spreadsheet model of this process, BTIME, captures this important time pattern effect using the Bern CO2 decay model to allow fuels to be compared for policy decisions on the basis of their real warming effects with a variety of user-supplied parameter values. The model also allows economic discounting of climate effects extended far into the future. Compared to approaches that simply sum greenhouse gas emissions over time, recognizing the physics of atmospheric CO2 decay significantly increases the deficit relative to fossil fuel of any biofuel causing land use change.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Environmental Engineering, Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/753c59b97a971cf8a53be7bceddc0a344d253466
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In Environmental Engineering
In Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment
Citations in the corpus
- Life cycle assessment of bioenergy systems: state of the art and future challenges. (2011, background): “Efforts to overcome this inconsistency can be recognized both in the recent literature (Kendall et al., 2009; O’Hare et al., 2009) and methodological standards (ISO, 2009).”
- Distributed biochar and bioenergy coproduction: a regionally specific case study of environmental benefits and economic impacts (2013, background): “Dynamic accounting of changes in carbon sinks is becoming more common in bioenergy LCA studies (O’Hare et al., 2009; Cherubini et al., 2011), and it is conceivable that it might significantly raise the GHG-mitigation estimate of biochars, particularly those with relatively low soil half-lives…”
- Global developments in the competition for land from biofuels (2011, methodology): “The debate has focussed on the development of robust methodologies for representation of iLUC effects and on the incorporation of these into whole life cycle assessments (LCAs) of biofuel GHG balances (see for example Searchinger et al., 2008; O’Hare et al., 2009; Hertel et al., 2010).”