METHODOLOGIES FOR ENVIRONMENTAL, MICRO- AND MACRO-ECONOMIC EVALUATION OF BIOENERGY SYSTEMS 1 R. van den Broek, A. van Wijk Department of Science, Technology and Society, Utrecht University Padualaan 14, 3584 CH Utrecht, The Netherlands Tel. : +31-30-2533145, Fax : +31-30-2537601, E-mail : Broek@nwsmail.chem.ruu.nl Paper presented at the European Conference on Biomass for Energy, Environment, Agriculture and Industry, 1996, Copenhagen. ABSTRACT An overview is given of methodologies used for evaluation of bioenergy systems on environmental, micro- and macro-economic aspects. To evaluate micro-economic impacts net present value and annualised cost calculation are used. For environmental impacts, methods used are: qualitative studies, energy analyses, life cycle assessments, LCA-related methods specially developed for bioenergy systems, and externality studies. Macro-economic impacts can be assessed by single direct indicators, efficiency prices, input-output analyses, social accounting matrices and general equilibrium models. Problems in the various methodologies are: assessment of costs for farm labour and land prices, environmental aspects on land-use, and weighing of different environmental impacts. Input-output analysis is a helpful tool, but also has several limitations. An important input parameter in all assessments is the energy crop yield. It can be based on testplots, crop production models and comparable crops in practice. Because statistical data lack, extrapolation to commercial farm practice remains a problem in all approaches. INTRODUCTION Biomass energy systems are different from conventional fossil fuel energy systems in many aspects. The main differences can be found with the production of energy crops and subsequent logistics. There are other kind of actors involved and one has to deal with environmental impacts that do not occur in fossil fuel systems, but that are closely related to common agriculture. This poses additional demands on the methodologies used to evaluate these systems. Different approaches have led to different results of evaluations of comparable systems. The main objective of this paper is to evaluate methodologies that have been used to assess environmental, micro- and macro-economic impacts of bioenergy systems. The focus is on evaluation of the whole integrated chain of bioenergy systems with energy crops as a resource. 1 This study is part of the 4 year research Assessment of biomass energy systems within the framework of the Dutch National Research Programme on Climate Change. Topics studied in this project are: (i) the relationship between energy farming and biodiversity; (ii) yield potentials under various land-use options and (iii) biomass conversion to methanol and hydrogen; (iv) methodological framework to assess biomass energy systems. On the basis of this assessment, a general framework will be developed to assess bioenergy systems on their main impacts, potentials and bottlenecks. The methodologies are categorised on the basis of the type of impacts studied, being micro-economic, environmental and macro-