The future of sustainability will be based on an economy that manages carbon circularly. The idea is to “close the loop” on carbon, a holistic or integrated approach that drives transformation in all areas of a material/product lifecycle so that materials and products keep their value within the economy for as long as possible. Carbonaceous waste streams are processed through energy recovery technologies to mitigate what was once a greenhouse gas emitting pathway and decrease the use of primary energy sources. The progression toward switching from fossil-based resources to renewable biomass feedstocks to think more circularly, rather than linearly, is a paradigm shift that results from appropriate policies that provide sufficient financial and technical support towards this path of sustainability and carbon neutrality. This abstract summary discusses the growing incentives, market demands, and various technologies that are shifting an oil-based linear market towards a carbon-based circular economy.
Policies and incentivization for sustainable carbon utilization have been growing in recent years. California’s Public Utility Commission’s Renewable Portfolio Standard (RPS) program has continuously evolved/accelerated to now call for 100% of the state’s electricity to come from carbon-free resources by 2045. Besides the obvious renewable electricity sources (wind, solar, hydrothermal), the RPS created incentives for other technologies such as biomass conversion, hydrogen fuel cell, and anaerobic digester biogas to renewable electricity.
In 2009, CARB’s Low Carbon Fuel Standard (LCFS) created a portfolio of Greenhouse Gas Policies designed to reduce GHGe in the transportation sector setting annual carbon intensity (CI) standards for the lifecycle of transportation fuels. Alternative/sustainable transportation fuels generated through biogas upgrading or enzyme reactions fed by food waste and green waste, bioenergy with carbon capture and storage and direct air projects, and zero-emission electric vehicle or renewable natural gas vehicle infrastructure are various types of projects and technologies that came to commercial-scale through financial incentives from LCFS. The financial incentives to generate LCFS credits create a way for once pie-in-the-sky technologies to become commercially viable.
2005’s Energy Policy Act created the Renewable Fuel Standard, a federal program, administered through the U.S. EPA. The RFS program is a national policy that requires a certain volume of renewable fuel to replace or reduce the quantity of petroleum-based transportation fuel, heating oil or jet fuel. Projects would be similar to those who gain credit under LCFS, and often projects are able to double-dip generating revenue from LCFS and RINS credits for the same volume of fuel. The ability to claim both LCFS and RINS credits makes massive renewable energy/fuel infrastructure projects financially lucrative to even traditional oil & gas industries.
Current emerging market trends have focused on the material side recovering as much economic value from what once was perceived as a waste. Municipal solid waste, agricultural wastes, landfill fugitive emissions, were once waste disposal/GHGe issue are now feedstocks that generate value-added products like biogas, renewable natural gas (RNG), carbon-negative transportation fuels, and compost that are used for decarbonizing existing energy infrastructures and revolve around the reutilization of carbon.
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