Congratulations to iSEE Interim Director Madhu Khanna, who was recently appointed to serve on a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Committee that will conduct the study Current Methods for Life Cycle Analyses of Low-Carbon Transportation Fuels in the United States.
Khanna is the ACES Endowed Professor of Agricultural and Consumer Economics at the University of Illinois-Champaign and the Sustainability Theme Leader at the U.S. Department of Energy-funded Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation (CABBI). She and the committee will assess current methods for estimating lifecycle greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions associated with transportation fuels (liquid and non-liquid) for potential use in a national low-carbon fuels program.
The committee will include these considerations:
- GHG emissions over the entire lifecycle of a given transportation fuel, including feedstock generation or extraction, feedstock conversion to a finished fuel or blendstock, distribution, storage, delivery, and use of the fuel in vehicles;
- Potentially significant indirect GHG emissions;
- Key assumptions, input parameters, and data quality and quantity, including spatial variability, for application of lifecycle GHG emission models; and
- Needs for additional data, methods for data collection, standardized inputs for lifecycle analyses, and model improvements.
For more information about this study, please visit Current Methods for Life Cycle Analyses of Low Carbon Transportation Fuels in the United States | National Academies.