(54d) Water Use and GHG Emissions for Sustainable Biofuel Development

The energy industry (fossil, nuclear, biomass) is a major water consumer as well as a producer of environmental liabilities. Competing water uses by industry can strain available freshwater supplies, raise the specter of resource depletion and environmental degradation and, in locations with high concentrations of fuel production facilities, result in substantial cumulative effects on water quality and quantity. Thus, water management has become a key feature of existing production facilities and a potential issue in new ones. Current research at Argonne National Laboratory is examining several facets of water sustainability in the energy industry, in addition to continuing work on GHG mitigation. Analyses are documenting and comparing progress in reducing water use in biofuel production from a life cycle perspective as well as addressing GHG emissions mitigated by displacing petroleum-based transportation fuels with cellulosic biofuels from advanced technologies like biochemical conversion, gasification, and pyrolysis. Argonne investigators are also exploring the feasibility and potential synergies associated with using contaminated water as a resource for biofuel feedstock production, thereby integrating feedstock production with environmental cleanup. As part of this latter work, tradeoffs between environmental benefits and biofuel cost and productivity are being quantified through the development of multi-objective decision-making tools.