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326 Biofuels for a More Sustainable Future

3Case study

In order to illustrate the developed fuzzy multicriteria decision making
method for sustainability ranking of biofuel production pathway, three sce-
narios for bioethanol were investigated by the developed fuzzy multicriteria
decision making method, and they are corn-, wheat-, and cassava-based
technologies for bioethanol production. A total of nine criteria in economic,
environmental, technological, and social-political aspects were employed to
assess these three biofuel production pathways, and they are life cycle cost
(LCC) in economic aspect, climate change (CC), terrestrial acidification
(TA), human toxicity (H.Tox), particulate matter formation (PMF) in envi-
ronmental aspect, technology maturity (TM) in technological aspect, and
social benefits (SB), contribution to economic development (CED), and
food security (FS) in social-political aspect.
In order to determine the fuzzy multicriteria decision-making matrix, a
focus group was held in China. Three full professors whose research focused
on bioenergy, three senior engineers who are skilled bioethanol production,
three PhD students who are working in the field of renewable energy, and
three administrators were invited to participate in the decision-making pro-
cess. One of the authors is the coordinator of this focus group meeting, and
he is responsible to achieve a consensus among these experts when there are
different opinions among them. After this focus group meeting, the experts
employed the linguistic terms presented in Table 11.2 to assign the weights
of the nine criteria and rate the three alternative pathways for bioethanol
production, and the results are presented in Table 11.3.

Table 11.3 The weights of the nine criteria and the performances of the three pathways
for bioethanol production with respect to each criterion using linguistic terms
Wheat-based Corn-based Cassava-based Relative importance
LCC B M G HT
CC B BT G HR
TA WE BR M H
H.Tox B BT G M
PMF WT BT M M
TM G G M HR
SB M M G L
CED M G BR M
FS WT B BT H