The environmental and economic effects of regional bioenergy policy in the southeastern U.S.

Meeting renewable energy and land use objectives through public–private biomass supply partnerships

“…These findings contrast those found recently in Galik et al (2015). In that assessment, a larger bioenergy demand with no spatial sourcing constraint, feedstock for meeting the target could be sourced anywhere within the Southeast region.…”

“…These collective technical and non-technical factors underscore the important role that policy plays in the emergence of viable bioenergy systems, giving rise to both multiple layers and types of policy interventions (e.g., Aguilar et al 2011;Becker et al 2011) and a variety of 5 analyses examining bioenergy market response to their deployment. For example, multiple analyses have assessed the influence of renewable portfolio standard implementation on bioenergy system response at the state (Galik et al 2009;Abt et al 2010a), regional (Galik et al 2015), and national (Latta et al 2013 levels, finding generally that bioenergy is capable of meeting substantial renewable energy targets, often with positive greenhouse gas mitigation benefits. Apart from policy-driven changes in bioenergy generation at the state, regional, and national levels, analyses also continue to explore novel bioenergy applications in the pursuit of diverse economic, social, and environmental objectives at the local and subregional level, as well (e.g., Saha andEckelman 2015, Pantaleo et al 2014).…”

“…Methodologically, we demonstrate the viability of linking two PE models of varying solution technique, sectoral scope, and resource detail, providing insight into how such crossplatform assessments may be undertaken in the future and the potential benefits and drawbacks of such an approach. From a policy perspective, we explore how traditional energy-focused policy decisions may be leveraged to achieve non-energy objectives through the use of novel interventions, an important issue generally, but of particular importance for bioenergy (Dale et al, 2015 an important driver of land use change (Veldkamp and Lambin, 2001;Choi et al, 2011), and the imposition of new demand for a given biomass feedstock could have a positive effect on land use affiliated with the new market opportunity (Ferris and Joshi, 2004;Feng and Babcock, 2010;Abt et al, 2010b;Galik et al, 2015). By targeting markets to discrete geographic areas, such efforts could also create a steady supply of locally-available biomass feedstock, thus helping to address supply concerns and logistical inefficiencies that could increase costs (e.g., Overend, 1982;Aksoy et al, 2011).…”

“…FASOMGHG applies an intertemporal welfare maximization framework that maximizes the sum of producer and consumer surplus for most primary and processed agricultural and forestry commodities while tying the sectors together through competition for a combined land base. The basic model specification is as described in Beach et al, (2010) but with additions to biopower and cofiring capacity as described in Latta et al (2013) and improvements related to logging residue generation as described in Galik et al (2015).…”

Modeling the impacts of wood pellet demand on forest dynamics in southeastern United States

“…The southeastern USA is defined as in previous studies of the forestry sector in the area and includes the states of Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas, as well as the western parts of the states of Texas and Oklahoma. The landscape patterns in the southeastern USA today were created through large‐scale deforestation for agriculture in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, followed by land abandonment and subsequent forest regeneration in the late nineteenth and twentieth century .…”