Greenhouse Gas Balances of Bioenergy Systems

Patricia Thornley is a chartered physicist with over 20 years’ experience working in bioenergy in industry and academia. She was involved with engineering implementation of many of the UK’s early bioenergy plants, but is now based at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of Manchester. Patricia leads the £12.8 million EPSRC SUPERGEN Bioenergy Hub, which aims to bring together industry, academia and other stakeholders to focus on the research challenges associated with delivering sustainable bioenergy systems. Her personal research interests focus on the environmental, social and economic impacts of bioenergy systems in the UK and overseas and how these can be practically managed to deliver sustainable bioenergy systems. She has worked extensively on greenhouse gas balances of bioenergy systems with several published journal papers on related life cycle assessment, but is also very active in policy and industrial engagement: working with policy stakeholders to inform methodologies for GHG assessment as well as with industrialists advising on and carrying out practical sustainability assessments for global bioenergy supply chains. She is also editor of the Elsevier Journal of Biomass and Bioenergy, has recently co-ordinated a special edition for that journal. Paul Adams, PhD, is a Research Officer in EPSRC’s SUPERGEN Bioenergy Hub and the Department of Mechanical Engineering at University of Bath, where he also teaches on the Energy & Environment and Integrated Environmental Management courses. He is currently working on several environmental and economic assessment and modelling research projects within the Sustainable Energy Research Team (SERT). Specifically, he is leading two work packages within the SUPERGEN Bioenergy Research hub, a research collaboration between several industrial and academic partners, assessing different bioenergy systems using life cycle assessment, and through the development of environmental/economic models.

1. Climate Change: a bioenergy driver and constraint 2. Policy mechanisms 3. The role of life cycle assessment 4. Scope of system for analysis 5. Carbon sequestration 6. Accounting for Greenhouse Gas Balances Associated with Land-Use 7. Harvesting, Processing and Transporting Biomass 8. Conversion technologies 9. End-Uses 10. Anaerobic Digestion of Farm Slurry and Residues for Gas Grid Injection 11. Biodiesel from Argentinian Soy 12. Combustion of Energy Crop Pellets for Home Heating 13. Production of Wood Pellets from Wood Waste 14. Second Generation Ethanol from Ligno-Cellulose 15. Electricity from north American forest residues 16. Agricultural Lessons 17. Engineering Lessons 18. Environmental Lessons 19. Policy Lessons 20. Outlook