woodwaste

Biomass is receiving increasing attention as scientists, policy makers, and growers search for clean, renewable energy alternatives. Compared with other renewable resources, biomass is very flexible it can be used as fuel for direct combustion, gasified, used in combined heat and power technologies, or biochemical conversions. Due to the wide range of feedstocks, biomass has a broad geographic distribution, in some cases offering a least-cost and near-term alternative. The objective of this research is to estimate the biomass resources available in the United States and map the results. To accomplish this objective, biomass feedstock data are analyzed both statistically and graphically using geographic information systems (GIS). A GIS is a computer-based information system used to create, manipulate, and analyze geographic information, allowing us to visualize relationships, patterns, or trends that are not possible to see with traditional charts, graphs, and spreadsheets. While other biomass resource assessments concentrate on the economic or theoretical availability, this study estimates the technical biomass resources available in the United States (page 59). The estimates are based on numerous assumptions, methodologies adopted from other studies, and factors that relate population to the amount of post-consumer residue generation. The main contribution of this research is that it adds a geographic perspective to biomass research by answering questions such as where the resources are and how much is available.

When fuelwood is harvested at a rate exceeding natural growth and inefficient conversion technologies are used, negative environmental and socio-economic impacts, such as fuelwood shortages, natural forests degradation and net GHG emissions arise. In this study, we argue that analyzing fuelwood supply/demand spatial patterns require multiscale approaches to effectively bridge the gap between national results with local situations. The proposed methodology is expected to help 1) focusing resources and actions on local critical situations, starting from national wide analyses and 2) estimating, within statistically robust confidence bounds, the proportion of non-renewable harvested fuelwood. Starting from a previous work, we selected a county-based fuelwood hot spot in the Central Highlands of Mexico, identified from a national wide assessment, and developed a grid-based model in order to identify single localities that face concomitant conditions of high fuelwood consumption and insufficient fuelwood resources. By means of a multicriteria analysis (MCA), twenty localities, out of a total of 90, were identified as critical in terms of six indicators related to fuelwood use and availability of fuelwood resources. Fuelwood supply/demand balances varied among localities from 16.2 2.5 Gg y 1 to 4.4 2.6 Gg y 1, while fractions of non-renewable fuelwood varied from 0 to 96%. These results support the idea that balances and non-renewable fuelwood fractions (mandatory inputs for Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) cookstoves projects) must be calculated on a locality by locality basis if gross under or over-estimations want to be avoided in the final carbon accounting.