Two School of Natural Resources and Environment professors have received a National Science Foundation grant from its Environmental Sustainability program to create models that can better predict the life-cycle environmental impacts of bioenergy systems.

The goal of the three-year $310,000 project is to develop the next generation life-cycle analysis (LCA) framework for the bioenergy industry by integrating with agent-based modeling. So-called LCA frameworks exist for many industries, including food and automobiles, but work best on established systems with available data. The emerging bioenergy industry generally lacks both.

Ming Xu and Shelie A. Miller, two assistant professors at SNRE, plan to develop a model that advances the field of environmental sustainability analysis. They will start with standard LCA frameworks and modify them to accommodate emerging technologies as well as dynamic and evolving supply chains.

They will then apply their improved LCA model to the U.S. switchgrass bioenergy system (covering biofuels and biomass electricity). They will be examining future supply-chain dynamics and evolution under different policy scenarios while also evaluating the associated life-cycle environmental impacts.

The result, the researchers write in their proposal, is expected to be a roadmap to help the nation and selected states achieve bioenergy development goals, meet market demand and minimize environmental impact.

"The method developed in this research can address one of the key challenges of trying to predict the environmental impacts of a non-established system: adding dynamic components that assist in the understanding of developing complex adaptive systems and the aggregate effect of a technology change," they wrote.

Both professors are part of the Sustainable Systems field of study within SNRE and core faculty of the Center for Sustainable Systems. The project's formal title is "Developing a Spatially-Explicit Agent-Based Life Cycle Analysis Framework for Improving the Environmental Sustainability of Bioenergy Systems."

More on the grant from NSF website: http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward.do?AwardNumber=1132581