סמינר מחלקתי - הרצאת אורחת: Prof. Sabrina Spatari

Opportunities for carbon abatement through development of biomass-to-bioenergy pathways

Sabrina Spatari, Associate Professor, Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering, Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA, USA, spatari@drexel.edu

Visiting Professor, Technion – Israel Institute of Technology

Biofuels are currently under development to meet policy goals for diversifying energy supply, reducing the carbon-intensity of transportation and other sectors, and stimulating growth in rural economies. Countries around the world including the U.S., Canada, Germany, and the UK have developed renewable and low carbon fuel policies to incentivize transport fuels derived from biomass into the market. At present biological and thermochemical technologies are under development at laboratory and pilot scale to investigate the technological needs and economics of scaling biofuels and value-added co-products. Ethanol, higher alcohols, and fully infrastructure compatible fuels (with 0% oxygen – physically and chemically similar to current petroleum based fuels) are being developed at different scales, including small (farm) scale (up to 200 dry metric tons/day) and industrial scale (2000 dry metric tons/day and higher) to utilize diverse sources of lignocellulose. Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a method for evaluating the environmental performance of biofuels and biomaterials emerging through R&D, and a necessary tool for developing and judging the compliance of those biofuels and value-added co-products under low carbon fuel standards. This presentation investigates technological, environmental, and energy and resource impacts of a set of emerging lignocellulose-based biofuels from biological and thermochemical technologies at different scales using statistically based LCA methods. Uncertainties that stem from technological performance in the near and medium terms are characterized. This presentation will further highlight how analytical models for understanding the full set of environmental tradeoffs associated with emerging biofuel technologies are essential inputs to guiding policy and commercial enterprise decision making for improving the overall sustainability of transportation energy supply.