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 decision-making 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.
Highlights
Chemical technologies and the chemical process industry provide a range of useful and valuable products derived from biobased resources for use in personal care products, health products, agrochemicals, and transportation fuels
Data used in process life cycle assessment (LCA) is at an intermediate scale since it is typically averaged to represent manufacturing processes, making it of limited use for making environmentally conscious engineering decisions about an individual process or equipment, which are at a finer scale, or for evaluating the effect on the macro economy, which is at a coarser scale
The framework outlined in this study has multiple features that make it conceptually attractive; the approach faces several challenges: (I) Interdisciplinary research requires effective communication, transfer, and synthesis of domain specific knowledge and data across research fields
Summary
Chemical technologies and the chemical process industry provide a range of useful and valuable products derived from biobased resources for use in personal care products, health products, agrochemicals, and transportation fuels. There is increasing realization that resource consumption and anthropogenic-derived impacts can have long-standing consequences on global ecological systems, and place strain on the natural biogeochemical cycles that support human life. Published findings from the millennium ecosystem assessment (MEA)—an international collaboration designed to assess the impact and widespread consequences of environmental change for human and ecological well-being, indicate that in the second half of the 20th century anthropogenic-derived resource degradation and overconsumption of natural capital have changed ecosystems more rapidly and extensively than in any comparable period in human history [1]. The outstanding challenge facing the chemical industry is the incorporation of environmental and sustainability objectives along with traditional design objectives in the development of emerging chemical processes. The rapid development of biofuels as a potentially sustainable and cleaner replacement for conventional fuels represents a unique challenge for the chemical industry that requires simultaneous consideration of economic, social, and ecological aspects and exemplifies an excellent content in which to understand the challenges and opportunities for designing sustainable supply chains
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