Biofuel emissions

This page describes the biofuel emissions inventories in GEOS-Chem.

Yevich & Logan inventory

The default biofuel inventory in GEOS-Chem is the Yevich & Logan [2003] inventory. This can be overwritten by the EPA/NEI99 biofuel emissions over North America and/or by the Streets 2006 inventory over China/SE Asia.

Abstract from Yevich & Logan [2003]:

We present an assessment of biofuel use and agricultural field burning in the developing world. We used information from government statistics, energy assessments from the World Bank, and many technical reports, as well as from discussions with experts in agronomy, forestry, and agro-industries. We estimate that 2060 Tg biomass fuel was used in the developing world in 1985; of this, 66% was burned in Asia, and 21% and 13% in Africa and Latin America, respectively. Agricultural waste supplies about 33% of total biofuel use, providing 39%, 29%, and 13% of biofuel use in Asia, Latin America, and Africa, and 41% and 51% of the biofuel use in India and China.We find that 400 Tg of crop residues are burned in the fields, with the fraction of available residue burned in 1985 ranging from 1% in China, 16–30% in the Middle East and India, to about 70% in Indonesia; in Africa about 1% residue is burned in the fields of the northern drylands, but up to 50% in the humid tropics. We distributed this biomass burning on a spatial grid with resolution of 1° x 1° and applied emission factors to the amount of dry matter burned to give maps of trace gas emissions in the developing world. The emissions of CO from biofuel use in the developing world, 156 Tg, are about 50% of the estimated global CO emissions from fossil fuel use and industry. The emission of 0.9 Pg C (as CO2) from burning of biofuels and field residues together is small, but nonnegligible when compared with the emissions of CO2 from fossil fuel use and industry, 5.3 Pg C. The biomass burning source of 10 Tg/yr for CH4 and 2.2 Tg N/yr of NOx are relatively small when compared with total CH4 and NOx sources; this source of NOx may be important on a regional basis.

EPA/NEI99 inventory

Please see our EPA/NEI99 North American emissions wiki page.

David Streets

The David Streets 2006 regional emissions inventory lumps anthropogenic and biofuel emissions together. Therefore, when you use this inventory, you must zero out the biofuel emissions. This is done in the streets_anthro_mod.f already.

References

1. INTEX-B, http://mic.greenresource.cn/intex-b2006; or http://www.cgrer.uiowa.edu/EMISSION_DATA_new/index_16.html
2. Zhang, Q., Streets, D. G., Carmichael, G. R., He, K. B., Huo, H., Kannari, A., Klimont, Z., Park, I. S., Reddy, S., Fu, J. S., Chen, D., Duan, L., Lei, Y., Wang, L. T., and Yao, Z. L.: Asian emissions in 2006 for the NASA INTEX-B mission, Atmos. Chem. Phys., 9, 5131-5153, 2009.
3. Yevich, R. and J. A. Logan, An assesment of biofuel use and burning of agricultural waste in the developing world, Global Biogeochem. Cycles, 17(4), 1095, doi:10.1029/2002GB001952, 2003. PDF

--Bob Y. 13:11, 19 March 2010 (EDT)