Well-to-wheels energy use and greenhouse gas emissions of ethanol from corn, sugarcane and cellulosic biomass for US use
By Michael Q. Wang, Jeongwoo Han, Jennifer Dunn, H. Cai, A. Elgowainy. 2012
448 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Globally, bioethanol is the largest volume biofuel used in the transportation sector, with corn-based ethanol production occurring mostly in the US and sugarcane-based ethanol production occurring mostly in Brazil. Advances in technology and the resulting improved productivity in corn and sugarcane farming and ethanol conversion, together with biofuel policies, have contributed to the significant expansion of ethanol production in the past 20 years. These improvements have increased the energy and greenhouse gas (GHG) benefits of using bioethanol as opposed to using petroleum gasoline. This article presents results from our most recently updated simulations of energy use and GHG emissions that result from using bioethanol made from several feedstocks. The results were generated with the GREET (Greenhouse gases, Regulated Emissions, and Energy use in Transportation) model. In particular, based on a consistent and systematic model platform, we estimate life-cycle energy consumption and GHG emissions from using ethanol produced from five feedstocks: corn, sugarcane, corn stover, switchgrass and miscanthus. We quantitatively address the impacts of a few critical factors that affect life-cycle GHG emissions from bioethanol. Even when the highly debated land use change GHG emissions are included, changing from corn to sugarcane and then to cellulosic biomass helps to significantly increase the reductions in energy use and GHG emissions from using bioethanol. Relative to petroleum gasoline, ethanol from corn, sugarcane, corn stover, switchgrass and miscanthus can reduce life-cycle GHG emissions by 19–48%, 40–62%, 90–103%, 77–97% and 101–115%, respectively. Similar trends have been found with regard to fossil energy benefits for the five bioethanol pathways.
Subfields: Agronomy and Crop Science, Biomedical Engineering, Environmental Engineering
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8f6be563cc69d93451c5ffbd8eb16fc60054c8af
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Citations in the corpus
- General Techno-Economic Analysis of CO2 Electrolysis Systems (2018, unknown): “89 This shows that CO 2 -derived chemicals and fuels can indirectly lead to a reduction of CO 2 emissions.”
- Biotechnological production of ethanol: Biochemistry, processes and technologies (2016, background): “The vast majority of US ethanol is produced from hydrolyzed starch deriving from corn, while bioethanol in Brazil primarily derives from sugar originated from sugarcane.”
- Using Attributional Life Cycle Assessment to Estimate Climate‐Change Mitigation Benefits Misleads Policy Makers (2014, background): “…managing review: Robert Anex © 2013 by Yale University DOI: 10.1111/jiec.12074 Volume 18, Number 1 et al. 2006; Lipman and Delucchi 2010; Wang et al. 2012) and, importantly, in reports targeting policy makers (Chum et al. 2011; Fulton et al. 2009; Berndes et al. 2010; Bird et al.…”
- Biomass and biofuels in China: Toward bioenergy resource potentials and their impacts on the environment (2018, background): “Most studies agreed that, without land use change impacts, biofuels release much less GHG emissions than their fossil fuel counterparts on a per unit energy basis [6,7,44].”