Integrated energy, environmental and financial analysis of ethanol production from cellulosic switchgrass

Ethanol production process from banana fruit and its lignocellulosic residues: Energy analysis

“…Switchgrass is one of the sources of lignocellulose that is currently being considered for ethanol production in the U.S.A. Preliminary studies conclude that cellulosic-ethanol obtained from switchgrass could not be a primary source of liquid fuel for substituting petroleum-based fuels due to the high use of fossil fuels in its production [12].…”

Greening passenger transport: a review

“…Carbon loss from land cleared in the tropics per unit of food output is three times that for temperate lands (West et al, 2010). When all GHGs, including N 2 O emissions, and other climate change effects are accounted for, even cellulosic liquid fuels could well show little climate change benefit over petroleum fuels (Felix and Tilley, 2009). …”

Sustainability and Chinese Urban Settlements: Extending the Metabolism Model of Emergy Evaluation

“…Meanwhile, emergy accounting often overestimates the low exergy (high entropy) fluxes [30], and more complementary work could be performed using exergy methods that offer useful insights for the correct assessment of the process. The emergy analysis may also be further refined by using the "partial transformities" approach (see [63]) to determine the sedimentary and renewable fraction of non-dissipated materials such as sand, stone, cement, and brick, thereby reducing the dominance of building materials in material emergy inputs.…”

“…To further explore self-supportive ability and to what extent the system is reliant on both renewable and nonrenewable natural resources, the resilience and renewability indicator (II) and natural resources reliance indicators (III) include fraction of self-support (ratio of indigenous natural resources to total emergy inputs), percent fuels and electricity (ratio of fuel and electricity inputs to total emergy inputs), and percent non-renewable (ratio of nonrenewable emergy inputs to total emergy inputs) to measure the system resilience, renewability, and natural resources reliance. The waste and environmental burden indicators (IV) suggest a measure of the relative load brought by waste to the renewable resources (ratio of waste emergy outputs to renewable natural resources emergy inputs), system environmental pressure posed by waste output (ratio of waste emergy outputs to total emergy inputs), and the non-renewable emergy placed on the local environment's indigenous natural resources emergy processing capacity (ratio of nonrenewable resources emergy flows to local indigenous natural resources inputs) [63]. Welfare indicators (V) show the outputs of system operation and the welfare benefits (total emergy inputs, material inputs, fuels and electricity input, construction input, transport infrastructure and fuel inputs, service input) per person from emergy consumption.…”