A systems approach to biofuels sustainability

Biomass Magazine | July 2009
By Lisa Gibson
Posted July 23, 2009, at 2:31 p.m. CST

Biofuels sustainability can be addressed by considering the agricultural, energy and environmental sectors as one large system, according to ‘Biofuels, Land and Water: A Systems Approach to Sustainability,’ a recent study by researchers at the Argonne National Laboratory. A problem for one sector could be a resource for another.

“We could find solutions to pressing problems of each [sector] that are not addressed while we keep the sectors compartmentalized,” said M. Cristina Negri, agronomist and environmental engineer at the lab. For example, nutrients in impaired water from agricultural runoff could be reused on biofuel crops, providing a potential solution to the inefficiency in the use of agricultural fertilizers near the Gulf of Mexico hypoxic zone, she said. This would be a substitute for costly fertilizers. Hypoxia or “dead zones” occur when the concentration of oxygen in water is decreased to the point where it can no longer support living aquatic organisms. The hypoxia in the Gulf of Mexico is said to be caused by fertilizer runoff from the Mississippi River, which flows through the U.S. Corn Belt.

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