Multi-Stakeholder Decision-Making for the Development of Livestock Waste-to-Biogas Systems

1604374 PI：Zavala Tejeda职务：多利益相关者决策制定牲畜粪便沼气系统的发展在美国动物饲养业务产生的牲畜废物估计为每年3亿吨。这些废物大部分被处置在泻湖中或储存在室外进行分解，导致许多环境问题，如温室气体（甲烷和一氧化二氮）和氨的排放，磷径流导致的地表沃茨富营养化，以及人类接触致病菌。从牲畜废物中生产沼气为解决这些问题提供了一个有前途的替代方案，同时提供了广泛的有价值的副产品，如电力，垫料和有机肥料。美国环保署的AgSTAR项目报告称，美国约有8,000个农场可以支持沼气系统，提供约1,600兆瓦的电力（足以为100万户家庭供电），并减少180万公吨的甲烷排放（相当于减少650万辆汽车的排放）。尽管有这种潜力，但沼气系统的发展受到技术成本高、从不可再生来源获得的天然气价格竞争以及政府政策和激励措施有限的限制。 该项目旨在开发优化模型和必要的解决方案，作为一个多利益相关者的决策工具，从牲畜废物开发沼气生产系统。该项目是一个跨学科的研究项目，结合了多目标和随机优化、社会选择和经济学、高性能计算以及农业和能源系统等方面的思想，旨在为多利益相关者、多目标优化问题开发计算效率高的解决方案。拟议的项目将率先将可信的社会客观指标纳入优化模型。PI提出了新的指标，用于将决策对多个利益相关者的影响纳入模型。开发的模型将涵盖以前未考虑过的更广泛的技术和配置。特别是，PI将模拟废物运输，储存和处理系统，原料和养分管理系统，沼气和电力生产和输送系统以及地区公用事业系统之间的相互作用。将这些系统结合起来的能力将为实现经济可行性和评估环境和社会影响提供新的机会。制定的框架将确定社会最佳的折衷解决方案，考虑到多个利益攸关方（城市/农村社区，环境团体，农民，技术提供商和地方/区域政府）的优先事项。这将通过使用统计指标来实现，例如条件风险价值和广义熵指数。这些衡量标准的使用将使决策者能够评估其决策对利益攸关方满意度的影响。项目小组可以获得真实的数据集和一组利益攸关方，以编制可能对所涉利益攸关方的决策进程产生直接影响的现实案例研究。 PI计划培养一名博士生，并为本科生和研究生课程开发新的教材。他们还建议开展外联活动，以提高公众对动物农场甲烷排放影响的认识，并招募代表性不足的少数民族学生进入STEM领域。

1604374 PI: Zavala TejedaTitle: Multi-Stakeholder Decision-Making for the Development of Livestock Waste-to-Biogas SystemsLivestock waste generated at U.S. animal feeding operations is estimated to be 300 million tons per year. Most of this waste is disposed of in lagoons or stored outdoors to decompose, leading to numerous environmental issues such as greenhouse gas (methane and nitrous oxide) and ammonia emissions, eutrophication of surface waters resulting from phosphorus runoff, and human exposure to pathogenic bacteria. Biogas production from livestock waste provides a promising alternative to address these issues while providing a wide range of valuable byproducts such as electricity, bedding, and organic fertilizer. The EPA's AgSTAR program reports that about 8,000 U.S. farms could support biogas systems, providing about 1,600 MW of electricity (enough to power one million homes) and reducing methane emissions by 1.8 million metric tons (equivalent to taking 6.5 million cars off the road). Despite this potential, the development of biogas systems has been limited by high technology costs, competing prices for natural gas obtained from non-renewable sources, and limited government policies and incentives. This project aims to develop optimization models and the necessary solution approaches as a multi-stakeholder decision making tool for developing biogas production systems from livestock waste. The proposed work is cross-disciplinary, combining ideas from multi-objective and stochastic optimization, social choice and economics, high-performance computing, and agricultural and energy systems.A key scientific objective of the proposed project is the development of computationally efficient solution strategies for multi-stakeholder, multi-objective optimization problems. The proposed project will pioneer the incorporation of credible social objective metrics into optimization models. The PIs propose new metrics for incorporating the impact of decisions on multiple stakeholders into the model. The models developed will capture a wider range of technologies and configurations not considered before. In particular, the PIs will model interactions between waste transport, storage, and processing systems, feedstocks and nutrient management systems, biogas and electricity production and delivery systems, and district utility systems. The ability to couple these systems will provide new opportunities to achieve economic viability and to evaluate environmental and social impacts. The developed frameworks will identify socially-optimal compromise solutions that factor in the priorities of multiple stakeholders (urban/rural communities, environmental groups, farmers, technology providers, and local/regional governments). This will be achieved by using statistical metrics, such as the conditional value at risk and the generalized entropy index. The use of these metrics will enable policy makers to assess the impact of their decisions on stakeholder satisfaction. The project team has access to real data sets and a group of stakeholders for formulating realistic case studies that may have immediate impact on the decision-making processes of the involved stakeholders. The PIs plan to train a PhD student and develop new teaching materials for undergraduate and graduate courses. They also propose outreach activities to increase public awareness on the effects of methane emissions from animal farms and recruit students from underrepresented minorities into STEM fields.