OOS 21-5 - Economic and water quality impacts of bioenergy crop expansion

Thursday, August 15, 2019: 9:20 AM
M107, Kentucky International Convention Center
Andy VanLoocke1,2, Emily A. Heaton3, Madhu Khanna4,5, Kelsie M. Ferin1,6 and Sarah Acquah7, (1)Agronomy, Iowa State University, Ames, IA, (2)Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation, Iowa State University, Ames, IA, (3)Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation, Iowa State University, Ames, IA, (4)Department of Agriculture and Consumer Economics, University of Illinois, (5)Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation, University of Illinois, (6)Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation, Iowa State University, (7)Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation, University of Illinois, Champaign, IL
Background/Question/Methods

Since passage of the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) nearly fifteen years ago, the question of how and where to implement the production of bioenergy crops has driven a broad and interdisciplinary inquiry and debate into the relationship between energy policy, land use and the environment. Of particular note, is the challenge faced when ‘top down’ approaches of sufficient scale and scope to make national scale environmental and economic assessments are incompatible with the ‘bottom up’ approaches at scales of decisions made by those who have the most direct impact. Informative policy and economic research requires national scale assessments which often apply broad sets of assumptions across large production regions. Similarly, when assessing regional scale ecosystem services, modeling approaches often homogenize landscapes to the scale of a US county, smoothing over variation in landscape attributes that takes place at scales two and three orders of magnitude smaller. As a result, the identification and implementation of key targeted areas and practices can miss opportunities on the landscape.

Results/Conclusions

Here we present the results from two lines of work that are proceeding toward combining ‘top down’ large scale analyses with precision ‘bottom up’ analysis, referred to here as “decision scale” since they are applied to individual parcels of managed land. Results from our integrated regional scale economic and environmental modeling analysis indicate that implementing production of bioenergy in accordance to the RFS would reduce nitrate leaching and reduce Gulf Hypoxia, but not sufficient to reach EPA targets. Our bottom up analysis for Iowa indicated that strategically integrating perennials on parcels of land with low farm level profit and high nitrate leaching could make proportionality large improvement to water quality however it is unclear what the national level economic and policy implications would be. To move forward with identifying and implementing economically and environmentally sustainable bioenergy production it will be key to merge the ‘top down’ and ‘bottom up’ approaches in a systematic assessment. Options for pursuing this approach and its implementation are discussed in the context of merged analysis.