Elsevier Biomass, Biofuels, Biochemicals: Green-Economy: Systems Analysis for Sustainability

Product Description Systems analysis for sustainability is an emerging discipline where technologies, processes or policies are evaluated comprehensively for sustainability. Trifold sustainability metrics such as technical feasibility, economic viability and environmental impacts are commonly used to assess sustainability. In addition to these metrics, it is important to consider resource sustainability, policies and social aspects for evaluating the sustainability of any proposed alternative. Green-Economy: Systems Analysis for Sustainability provides a theoretical background to perform such analyses and detailed case studies. The first part of this book introduces methods and tools to perform technical feasibility analysis, economic viability analysis, environmental impacts assessment, environmental risk assessment, resource sustainability assessment, policy and social aspects of technologies, general logic-based sustainability assessment for green products and introduces resilience thinking. The second part of the book focuses on case studies with an emphasis on solar energy, biofuels and bioproducts from across the globe. Review Provides interdisciplinary methods for performing a comprehensive evaluation of technology/product/policy alternatives in the emerging green economy About the Author Short CV: Ganti S. Murthy is a professor in Biological and Ecological Engineering Department at Oregon State University. He completed his B.Tech in Agricultural Engineering from NERIST, Arunachal Pradesh and M.Tech in Dairy and Food Engineering from IIT-Kharagpur, India. He then went to pursue PhD in Agricultural and Biological Engineering at Univ. of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and obtained his PhD in Dec., 2006. He joined Oregon State University in 2007. Dr. Murthy’s research is broadly focused on sustainable bioprocessing. For any proposed technology or policy, Murthy group seeks to answer the question: “Is this approach technically feasible, economic viable, resource sustainable and has lower environmental impacts compared to alternatives? If not, how can we make it so. His group employs a combination of experimental and theoretical approaches using control theory, systems biology, process modeling, economic analysis and life cycle assessment (LCA) techniques to conduct molecular, cellular, industrial scale and systems level analyses of technologies to establish a sustainable bioeconomy. Recently, Murthy group has been trying to understand the nutrient-energy-water nexus at regional and global scale with particular focus on building resilience of agro-ecological systems to pulse and pressure disturbances. Edgard Gnansounou is Professor of modelling and planning of Energy Systems at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL) where he is Director of the Bioenergy and Energy Planning Research Group. His current research works comprise techno-economic and environmental assessment of bio-refinery schemes based on conversion of agricultural residues. He is leading research projects in that field in several countries including Brazil, Colombia and South Africa. Edgard Gnansounou is credited with numerous papers in high impact scientific journals. He is member of the editorial board of Bioresource Technology. He graduated with a M.S. in Civil Engineering and Ph.D. in Energy Systems at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne. He was a visiting researcher at the Thayer College, Dartmouth School of Engineering with Professor Charles Wyman (USA), at Polytech of Clermont-Ferrand, University Blaise Pascal (France) and at the Center of Biofuels, the National Institute for Interdisciplinary Science and Technology, Trivandrum (India). He was also a visiting Professor of the African University of Science of Technology (Abuja, Nigeria). He is a citizen of Benin (Africa) and Switzerland. Professor Ashok Pandey is Deputy Director at CSIR’s National Institute for Interdisciplinary Science and T