Members of WSP Environment & Energy's Sustainability and Energy team in the US constructed a life-cycle assessment (LCA) model for ICM, Inc., the largest provider of production process technology to the US fuel ethanol industry. This work led to the US National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) commissioning WSP and ICM to carry out a comparative study of fuel ethanol LCA models.
There is a need in the ethanol industry for a low-cost way of evaluating fuel ethanol for compliance with the US Renewable Fuels Standard. WSP's Excel workbook-based model fills the need for a low-cost tool. It provides a robust and accurate, yet easy-to-use, means by which the life-cycle energy and carbon footprint can be quantified for ethanol produced at a specific manufacturing facility. It compares the energy and carbon performance of corn-based ethanol against Brazilian sugarcane ethanol and conventional and reformulated gasoline.
Industry interest in WSP's (http://www.wspenvironmental.com) LCA model led NREL to commission ICM and WSP to conduct a study that compared the outputs of the two leading motor fuels LCA models, GREET and BESS, to the outputs of WSP's model. Completed in October 2009, the study performed an "apples-to-apples"
