Environmental Sciences Division, Center for BioEnergy Sustainability, Climate Change Science Institute, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, One Bethel Valley Road, Oak Ridge, TN 37831-6036, USA.
Environ Manage. 2013 Feb;51(2):307-38. doi: 10.1007/s00267-012-9983-6. Epub 2012 Dec 2.
Understanding the environmental effects of alternative fuel production is critical to characterizing the sustainability of energy resources to inform policy and regulatory decisions. The magnitudes of these environmental effects vary according to the intensity and scale of fuel production along each step of the supply chain. We compare the spatial extent and temporal duration of ethanol and gasoline production processes and environmental effects based on a literature review and then synthesize the scale differences on space-time diagrams. Comprehensive assessment of any fuel-production system is a moving target, and our analysis shows that decisions regarding the selection of spatial and temporal boundaries of analysis have tremendous influences on the comparisons. Effects that strongly differentiate gasoline and ethanol-supply chains in terms of scale are associated with when and where energy resources are formed and how they are extracted. Although both gasoline and ethanol production may result in negative environmental effects, this study indicates that ethanol production traced through a supply chain may impact less area and result in more easily reversed effects of a shorter duration than gasoline production.
了解替代燃料生产对环境的影响对于描述能源资源的可持续性以告知政策和监管决策至关重要。这些环境影响的大小取决于供应链中每个步骤的燃料生产强度和规模。我们通过文献综述比较了乙醇和汽油生产过程及其环境影响的空间范围和时间持续时间，然后在时空图上综合了规模差异。对任何燃料生产系统的综合评估都是一个动态目标，我们的分析表明，关于分析的时空边界选择的决策对比较有巨大影响。在规模方面强烈区分汽油和乙醇供应链的影响与能源资源的形成时间和地点以及它们的提取方式有关。尽管汽油和乙醇的生产都可能产生负面的环境影响，但本研究表明，通过供应链追踪的乙醇生产可能对较小的区域产生影响，并且其影响持续时间较短，更容易逆转。
