Mobilisation of agricultural residues for bioenergy and higher value bio-products:Resources, barriers and sustainability
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Agricultural crop residues are relevant types of biomass for bioenergy and other bioproducts as they are by-products of agricultural crop production, and do not require additional land for harvest.Estimates of the potential available for bioenergy and other uses vary significantly.While the theoretical potential is high, the economic availability can vary greatly.It depends on numerous factors including the yield and site specific parameters, the type of crop rotation, slope and soil type, length of the harvest window, the presence of a local processor or aggregator, and whether the agriculture producer sees value in collecting a portion of the crop residue.Several product-based sustainability schemes were reviewed, namely Global Bioenergy Partnership (GBEP), ISO 13065, PROSUITE, LEEAFF and a new scheme developed by U.S. DOE.While these schemes all address the three pillars of sustainability -social, environmental and economic -they vary in terms of the level of application and data requirements.Dale et al. (2015) propose a process for clearly defining the goals of the assessment to select the most appropriate tool.National cases of supply chains were assessed more closely.A sustainability assessment using the GBEP framework was made for Denmark.Ten sustainability indicators were evaluated and it was found that the use of agricultural residues for energy contributes to GHG emission reductions, to diversification of the energy supply, to income generation in rural areas.The most critical issue from an environmental point of view is the risk of depleting soil organic matter through continued removal of crop residues.The area affected by crop residue harvest has increased since 2000 putting increased pressure on carbon stored in agricultural soils.Business economic viability of the Danish supply chains are ensured by a strong political focus and mandated use of crop residues for energy combined with economic incentives as tax exemption and feed in tariffs.The Danish case also evaluated the applicability GBEP framework and highlighted a number of issues that could be discussed and may be further developed.The framework is data intensive, unambiguous attribution of impacts to processes and supply chains is difficult, and boundary crossing data and imported feedstock is not covered adequately.The GBEP framework is, however, not special in that respect as these issues pertain to most sustainability assessment frameworks.Research was done to define categories for indicators of environmental and socioeconomic sustainability for the U.S.Here focus is on the use of crop residues for liquid fuels.Targets set by the Renewables Fuel Standard 2 (RFS2) drives research and industry development toward lignocellulosic ethanol production.The most critical barriers for the continuous expansion of the U.S. cellulosic biofuel industry are related to economic viability and project finance.The industry is considered as a high risk investment due to technical barriers and uncertainty about the projects' profitability.For Canada, here exemplified by Ontario, a corn stover to bioenergy case is not viable, and higher value products would have to be produced in a biorefinery type configuration to ensure economic profitability.A system based on partial corn stover removal added to corn grain harvest was compared with an existing corn grain only harvest using LEEAFF.The stakeholder exercise showed that neither system was without some issues or sensitivities.A corn stover system would likely provide benefits for categories of sustainability, such as land use efficiency, broad stakeholder acceptability, GHG emission reduction, and employment.Corn stover feedstock supply chains are not operational currently and several new technologies would have to demonstrate financial profitability at scale, and there are unknowns to address regarding nutrient addition and long term soil health.It is concluded that further opportunities for sustainable use of agricultural residues exist.Opportunities are, however, country and site specific, making it difficult to predict the global impact.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.018 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".