Carbon Cycling, Environmental & Rural Economic Impacts of Collecting & Processing Specific Woody Feedstocks in Biofuels
- North Carolina State Univ., Raleigh, NC (United States)
- Univ. of Washington, Seattle, WA (United States)
- WoodLife Environmental Consultants, LLC, Corvallis, WA (United States); Consortium for Research on Renewable Industrial Materials (CORRIM), Corvallis, OR (United States)
- Univ. of Washington, Seattle, WA (United States); Consortium for Research on Renewable Industrial Materials (CORRIM), Corvallis, OR (United States)
- Univ. of Washington, Seattle, WA (United States); Lippke & Associates (United States)
- Universidad Católica del Maule (Chile); Univ. of Washington, Seattle, WA (United States)
- Univ. of Maine, Orono, ME (United States)
- State Univ. of New York (SUNY), Albany, NY (United States)
Woody biomass will be an essential feedstock for a large-scale cellulosic biofuel industry. The life cycle carbon accounting for the production of biofuels from woody feedstocks is complex and has engendered significant controversy. Issues such as below ground carbon, carbon debt, varied regional forest practices, multiple parallel forest product lines, and development of realistic counterfactual scenarios all contribute to the complexity. DOE funded CORRIM to develop comprehensive and definitive lifecycle inventories and assessments on the production of fuels from woody feedstocks. CORRIM brought together expertise in forest practices, short rotation woody crops, bioconversion of woody biomass, process modeling, and life cycle assessment to successfully accomplish this goal. The CORRIM team has developed data on forest productivity, fuel usage, and fuel production for six regionally specific forest systems. These six forest systems include three current commercial systems; southern pine plantations, Douglas-fir plantations, naturally regenerated Northeastern (NE) spruce/fir, and three ‘short rotation woody crops’, poplar, eucalyptus and willow, which are at different stages of demonstration in the US. The fuel production systems include cellulosic ethanol and bio-oil based hydrocarbons. The project was successfully reviewed at the BETO Program review in March 2015, 2017, and 2019 and has resulted currently in 19 publications and reports and 35 presentations at both national and international conferences, with more in the pipeline. See publications and presentations for links to each document. Finally, and most importantly, CORRIM has gone beyond the scope of the original DOE proposal to work closely with GREET at Argonne National Laboratory (ANL) to incorporate all the life cycle data and scenario models into their modeling system. GREET is the most widely used and definitive information source for evaluating lifecycle carbon emissions for fuels. The incorporation of CORRIM data from this project guarantees the results of the research will be extensively used and widely disseminated. Technical process improvements and policy relevant accomplishments are detailed in the relevant programmatic sections in the full report including citations therein. Highlights are summarized here for easy reference.
- Research Organization:
- Consortium for Research on Renewable Industrial Materials (CORRIM), Corvallis, OR (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), Sustainable Transportation Office. Bioenergy Technologies Office
- DOE Contract Number:
- EE0002992
- OSTI ID:
- 1606207
- Report Number(s):
- DOE-CORRIM-0002992-1
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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