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348 Biofuels for a More Sustainable Future

3Case study

In order to illustrate the developed interval multicriteria decision making
method for sustainability prioritization of biofuel production pathways
under uncertainties, three alternative bioethanol production pathways
including wheat-, corn-, and cassava-based technologies for bioethanol pro-
duction were studied by the developed method. Eight criteria including life
cycle cost (LCC) in economic aspect, climate change (CC), terrestrial acid-
ification (TA), human toxicity (H.Tox), particulate matter formation (PMF)
in environmental aspect, and social benefits (SB), contribution to economic
development (CED), and food security (FS) in social-political aspect were
used for sustainability assessment of these three bioethanol production path-
ways, and the data were modified from the work of Ren et al. (2015b),as
presented in Table 12.2.
The interval decision-making matrix can be determined by changing the
data with 10% positive/negative derivations, and the results are presented in
Table 12.3.

Table 12.2 The data of the alternative bioethanol production pathways with respect to
the eight criteria (Ren et al., 2015b)
Criteria Unit Wheat-based Corn-based Cassava-based
CC kg CO 2 eq 5.746 0.461 1.662
TA kg SO 2 eq 2.806 0.166 0.834
H.Tox kg1,4-dBeq 1.619 0.096 0.481
PMF Kg PM 10 eq 0.342 0.017 0.105
LCC RMB Yuan 5220 4937 4259
SB – 8.75 8.75 9.75
CED – 7 8.75 9.75
FS – 0.25 1.25 9.75

Table 12.3 The interval multicriteria decision making matrix for ranking the three
alternative bioethanol production pathways
Criteria Unit Wheat-based Corn-based Cassava-based
CC kg CO 2 eq [5.171 6.321] [0.415 0.507] [1.496 1.828]
TA kg SO 2 eq [2.525 3.087] [0.149 0.183] [0.751 0.917]
H.Tox kg1,4-dBeq [1.457 1.781] [0.086 0.106] [0.433 0.529]
PMF Kg PM 10 eq [0.308 0.376] [0.015 0.019] [0.095 0.116]
LCC RMB Yuan [4698 5742] [4443.3 5430.7] [3833.1 4684.9]
SB – [7.875 9.625] [7.875 9.625] [8.775 10.725]
CED – [6.3 7.7] [7.875 9.625] [8.775 10.725]
FS – [0.225 0.275] [1.125 1.375] [8.775 10.725]