Emerging Technologies Life Cycle Design Tool: Biofuels

Emerging technologies life cycle design tool: biofuels

• Executive Summary

Biofuels are an emerging, disruptive technology with important economic and climate ramifications.  The use of life cycle assessment (LCA) by scientists and regulators to measure and differentiate among biofuels is growing in sophistication and application. Yet many other biofuels decision makers like politicians and even the biofuels industry itself primarily react to cutting edge LCA science and policy.  This is in large part because of the lack of an intuitive, freely available, easy to use, web based tool targeted to these decision makers. The proposed project brings together a uniquely qualified, interdisciplinary team of UC Berkeley graduate students.  We will assemble an intuitive tool for biofuels design which we plan to use as model for further tools to measure other emerging technologies that aim to be cleaner-than-business-as-usual.  Our team comprises students working at the cutting edge of LCA, biofuels LCA, green information web design, green information user interface design, and biofuels business and investment.
We will produce:

·        a potential user needs assessment based on interviews with key biofuels decision makers

·         a comprehensive review of the functionality and usability of state-of-the-art, fee-based LCA product design tools

·        a comprehensive review of  web-based environmental information user interfaces/calculators

·        A 6 month update on project progress posted to the BBB website

·        a poster to be displayed at the 2009 UC Berkeley BERC Energy Symposium

·        a website prototype based on informal user interface review

·        a working paper on the prospects for developing a design tool for biofuels and other “clean” technologies

·        a business plan

·        applications to further funding sources to ensure resources for more development and dissemination of our tool