A Review on Water-Energy-Greenhouse Gas Nexus of the Bioenergy Supply and Production System

Tremendous global pressures like resource depletion and climate change urge us to deploy alternate energy sources and to integrate carbon capture and sequestration processes. Biomass can be considered as one of the alternate renewable carbon-based fuels that can decrease environmental footprints in different applications. There is currently a lack of systematic review of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and water-energy nexus (WEN) in the biomass supply chains’ system (BSCs) system. Therefore, the present study aims to conduct a comprehensive review of the studies carried out into WEN and GHG emissions regarding the BSCs. The published papers investigated in this study were categorized and evaluated based on their objectives, methodologies, geographic scales, and environmental sustainability factors.

The review revealed that not only literatures lack enough research into WEN and GHG, but also the capacity for effectively assessing the relationships between water, energy, and the trend of GHG emissions at a higher resolution. In addition, it was found that most of the previous studies have mainly focused on the economic influences of BSCs and mathematical methods for the optimization of BSCs. There is a need for the development of a mathematical dynamic model considering uncertainties and the multi-objective approaches to evaluate the trend of WEN and GHG in the BSCs.

To achieve a sustainable development of the BSCs, WEN and GHG emissions need to be effectively managed. The findings of the present paper will assist researchers who work on renewable energy issues and potential users of the bioenergy industry to obtain a deeper understanding of the current state of knowledge in terms of WEN and GHG emission.