The prerequisite for a sustainable and equitable use of common resources (the so-called Commons) must be the proper evaluation of their role within the complex network of relationships that ensure ecosystems functioning, resilience, and evolutionary dynamics. It is crucial to ascertain to what...

Bioenergy is one of the most dynamic and rapidly changing sectors of the global energy economy. The use of food crops for conversion to biofuel has been criticized for several reasons, among which its competition with the global food chain. Instead, lignocellulosic substrates are claimed to...

Ethanol production from wheat has become an emerging economic activity in Henan Province due to the establishment in 2001 of the National Program for Alcohol Production. The program aimed at facing the unfolding world energy crisis in the near future and increasing China's energy security....

Emergy Accounting and Synthesis, developed by Howard Odum in the 1980s, accounts for both the work of nature and that of humans as part of it in generating products and services. Since the 1990s, when Odum's system theories and emergy approach were introduced to China, a great attention was paid...

The thermodynamic efficiency and the environmental sustainability of selected processes that deliver gaseous energy carriers (natural gas, syngas from coal gasification, and hydrogen from steam reforming of natural gas and alkaline electrolysis) is explored by means of a multi-criteria,...

The paper discusses the similarities and the incompatibilities between two forms of Energy Analysis (exergy and emergy, ‘EXA’ and ‘EMA’ in the following), both of which try to represent the behavior of physical systems by means of cumulative energy input/output methods that result in a...

This paper focuses on a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of four waste management strategies: landfill without biogas utilization; landfill with biogas combustion to generate electricity; sorting plant which splits the inorganic waste fraction (used to produce electricity via Refuse Derived Fuels,...