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Life Cycle Assessment for resource nexus analysis
Published in Raimund Bleischwitz, Holger Hoff, Catalina Spataru, Ester van der Voet, Stacy D. VanDeveer, Routledge Handbook of the Resource Nexus, 2017
Ester van der Voet, Jeroen B. Guinée
In the case of bio-energy, allocation occurs especially when waste streams or by-products such as corn stover, flax shives or wheat stems are used to make fuel or generate electricity. This can be ‘solved’ by declaring such by-products to be waste. In that case, the resource and energy intensity is zero. Allocating on a mass basis usually means that very large parts of the burden are allocated to the bio-energy, usually rendering it useless because it is worse than fossil fuels. Economic allocation makes more sense, but is again unstable with fluctuating (relative) prices. A method often used here is ‘avoided burden’: by producing bio-energy in addition to food crops, the production of fossil energy is ‘avoided’ and the hypothetical emissions of fossil energy production may be subtracted from the emissions of the bio-energy production. As it leaves the path of thinking in supply chains, this method is not applicable for calculating resource intensities in the framework of a resource nexus analysis. Allocation thus is a complicating factor, but such issues invariably arise when dealing with complex chains and networks of supply, even while aiming to focus on one resource or product only. They will show up in the analysis of the resource nexus as well.
Assessing the aggregated environmental benefits from by-product and utility synergies in the Swedish biofuel industry
Published in Biofuels, 2020
Michael Martin, Elisabeth Wetterlund, Roman Hackl, Kristina M. Holmgren, Philip Peck
The environmental assessments were conducted following life cycle assessment methodology, specifically the system expansion, or avoided burden, methodology (Step 4 in Figure 1). In this method, allocation in multi-functional processes can be avoided through expanding the system to remove burdens created by replaced conventional products and services (see also Figure 2).