Economic and environmental evaluation of miscanthus sustainability as a bioenergy feedstock

Miscanthus is a perennial grass and has attracted great research interests as a promising biofuel and bioproduct feedstock. To project the impacts of miscanthus production on an ecosystem and the sustainability of the generated biofuels and bioproducts, robust and spatially explicit evaluation of the entire field-to-biorefinery value chain is required. The overarching goal of this work is to determine the economic and environmental sustainability of biorefineries with miscanthus as the feedstock. Using an ethanol biorefinery as an example, we leveraged the ecosystem model DayCent and the biorefinery simulation tool BioSTEAM for integrated life cycle assessment (LCA) and techno-economic analysis (TEA). We quantified global warming potential (GWP) and cost of the produced ethanol with location-specific parameters (e.g., climate and soil conditions) across the rain-fed U.S. Our results indicated that miscanthus yield and soil organic carbon change are the main drivers of the sustainability of miscanthus-derived biofuels and the cost of the biofuel is dependent on the feedstock yield and economic parameters of the state in which it is located.

Name thesis:degree_name

M.S.

Level thesis:degree_level

Thesis

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Environ Engr in Civil Engr

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2024

Author dc:creator

• Lin, Emily Paige

Contributors dc:contributor

• Guest, Jeremy S

• Biofuel
• Bioenergy
• Miscanthus Life Cycle Assessment
• Techno-economic Analysis

Statement dc:rights

• Copyright 2024 Emily Lin

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/125831

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F125831