Multidimensional Aspects of Sustainable Biofuel Feedstock Production

Anna Raschke, J. Sebastian Hernandez-Suarez, A. Pouyan Nejadhashemi and Kalyanmoy Deb
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Anna Raschke: Department of Biosystems and Agricultural Engineering, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA
J. Sebastian Hernandez-Suarez: Department of Biosystems and Agricultural Engineering, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA
A. Pouyan Nejadhashemi: Department of Biosystems and Agricultural Engineering, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA
Kalyanmoy Deb: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 3, 1-19

Abstract: Bioenergy is becoming increasingly relevant as an alternative to fossil fuels. Various bioenergy feedstocks are suggested as environmentally friendly solutions due to their positive impact on stream health and ability to sequester carbon, but most evaluations for bioenergy feedstocks have not evaluated the implications of bioenergy crop production holistically to date. Through the application of multi-objective optimization on 10 bioenergy feedstock rotations in a Michigan watershed, a Pareto front is searched to identify optimal trade-off solutions for three objective functions representing stream health, environmental emissions/carbon footprint, and economic feasibility. Various multi-criteria decision-making techniques are then applied to the resulting Pareto front to select a set of most-preferred trade-off solutions, which are compared to optimal solutions from each individual objective function. The most-preferred trade-off solutions indicate that a diverse mix of rotations are necessary to optimize all three objectives, whereas the individually optimal solutions do not consider a diverse range of feedstocks, thereby making the proposed multi-objective treatment an important and pragmatic strategy.

Keywords: stream health; life cycle analysis; bioenergy; carbon sequestration; system approach; multi-objective optimization (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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