Design of Sustainable Biofuel Processes and Supply Chains: Challenges and Opportunities

Abstract

Abstract:The current methodological approach for developing sustainable biofuel processes and supply chains is flawed. Life cycle principles are often retrospectively incorporated in the design phase resulting in incremental environmental improvement rather than selection of fuel pathways that minimize environmental impacts across the life cycle. Further, designing sustainable biofuel supply chains requires joint consideration of economic, environmental, and social factors that span multiple spatial and temporal scales. However, traditional life cycle assessment (LCA) ignores economic aspects and the role of ecological goods and services in supply chains, and hence is limited in its ability for guiding decisionmaking among alternatives-often resulting in sub-optimal solutions. Simultaneously incorporating economic and environment objectives in the design and optimization of emerging biofuel supply chains requires a radical new paradigm. This work discusses key research opportunities and challenges in the design of emerging biofuel supply chains and provides a high-level overview of the current "state of the art" in environmental sustainability assessment of biofuel production. Additionally, a bibliometric analysis of over 20,000 biofuel research articles from 2000-to-present is performed to identify active topical areas of research in the biofuel literature, quantify the relative strength of connections between various biofuels research domains, and determine any potential research gaps. OPEN ACCESSProcesses 2015, 3 635

Hybrid Phytoremediation: an Ultimate Bio-Solution for Leachate

“…90-95% of algal bio-oil is retractable (Dong et al, 2016;Ihsanullah et al, 2015) and thus the fusion of both yielded an ultimate output of approx. 87% (Zaimes et al, 2015).…”

Management of Competitiveness of the Supply Chain in the Logistical Systems of a Small Agrarian Business

“…Thus, G.G. Zaimes [14], V. Kravtsiv [7], M.Y. Postan [11], K. Caffrey [3], M. Chakkol [4] consider that the chain supply is first of all a set of certain organizations, business entities which are regulated by the flows and processes, underlining the space measurement of the supply chain.…”

A Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) Approach Using Hybrid SCOR Metrics, AHP, and TOPSIS for Supplier Evaluation and Selection in the Gas and Oil Industry

“…They also use the MCDM model to perform their analysis. Zaimes et al [15] discussed key research opportunities and challenges in the design of supply chains. Wang et al [16] applied the multi-criteria group decision-making (MCGDM) model for supplier selection in a rice supply chain.…”