(695b) Life Cycle Carbon Footprint of Renewable Electricity Generation from Aspen Forest Harvest in Wisconsin, USA
AIChE Annual Meeting
2019
2019 AIChE Annual Meeting
Sustainable Engineering Forum
Life Cycle Analysis of Bio-Based Fuels, Energy, and Chemicals
Thursday, November 14, 2019 - 12:55pm to 1:20pm
The study investigates aspen forest harvest in Wisconsin as a case study. A life cycle assessment model is used to quantify the cradle-to-grave GHG emission of renewable electricity, including soil and landscape C change, wood harvest, and combustion in fluidized bed boiler. The soil and landscape C changes in the LCA model is simulated using the DAYCENT ecosystem model parameterized for the site for both the afforestation and bioenergy scenarios using site-specific data such as weather, soil texture and carbon, etc while the LCA software, SimaPro is used to model the generation of electricity from timber. This study also investigates the potential effect of climate change in future years will have on the scenarios modeled. We assume moderate (2.1 °C/century) and severe climate warming (4.2 °C/century) scenarios with 10% increase in annual precitation as inputs to the DAYCENT model to project effects on forest carbon pools.