Assessing the Additional Carbon Savings with Biofuel
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Assessing the Additional Carbon Savings with Biofuel Madhu Khanna 1 & Weiwei Wang 2 & Michael Wang 3
# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract A recent study by DeCicco et al. (Climatic Change 138:667–680, 2016) claims that corn used for ethanol should not be considered to be inherently biogenically carbon-neutral because not all that corn was grown additional to the level otherwise. By assessing the extent of carbon neutrality of corn for ethanol using the reference point baseline approach and historical data that study concluded that the carbon intensity of US corn ethanol is 27% higher than that of gasoline. We develop a framework to determine the carbon neutrality of corn for ethanol by assessing the additional carbon uptake by crops using an anticipated baseline approach. We also apply this framework to determine the additional corn produced for ethanol and include the direct life cycle carbon emissions of only that portion of corn in the direct life cycle carbon intensity of corn ethanol. We implement this framework by integrating an economic model of the agricultural sector in the USA with a biogenic carbon model and life cycle analysis to quantify biogenic carbon uptake and direct life cycle emissions with and without corn ethanol expansion over the 2007–2027 period. We find that the combined biogenic carbon emissions and direct life cycle carbon emission intensity of corn ethanol (not including indirect land use related emissions) is 21% lower than gasoline. The lower value of this carbon intensity of corn ethanol compared with gasoline is robust to a wide range of parametric assumptions. Keywords Biogenic carbon intensity . Corn ethanol . Economic model . Dynamic optimization . Anticipated baseline approach . Life cycle carbon intensity
Introduction
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s12155-020-10149-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Madhu Khanna [email protected] Weiwei Wang [email protected] Michael Wang [email protected] 1
Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics, Institute for Sustainability, Energy, and Environment, Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation, University of Illinois Urbana, Champaign, IL 61801, USA
2
Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation, University of Illinois Urbana, Champaign, IL 61801, USA
3
Systems Assessment Group, Energy Systems Division, Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, IL 60439, USA
Corn ethanol production in the USA has more than doubled since 2007 and diverted about 40% of corn produced in the USA in 2018.1 Key motivations for biofuel policies in the USA for more than a decade have been a desire to achieve energy diversification by switching to a domestically produced renewable fuel and to mitigate the carbon emissions associated with transportation fuels in the USA. Most studies estimating the carbon effects of biofuels have focused on the life cycle emissions (direct and indire
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