With the support from ARPA-E’s Systems for Monitoring and Analy??cs for Renewable Transporta??on Fuels from Agricultural Resources and Management (SMARTFARM) project, Argonne has been developing the Feedstock Carbon Intensity Calculator (FD-CIC) to calculate feedstock-specific, farm-level CI of biofuel feedstocks. The FD-CIC tool released in 2022 is configured to generate single-year CI for common U.S. feedstocks, such as corn, soybeans, sorghum, and rice, as well as interna??onal feedstock, such as Canadian corn and Brazilian sugarcane.
To es??mate the life cycle GHG emissions of soybean produc??on from mul??-year crop rota??ons and varying farming prac??ces, we assessed farming energy/chemical inputs and conducted detailed soil organic carbon (SOC) modeling of soybean produc??on from common crop rota??ons including corn-soybean (CS) and corn-corn-soybean (CCS).
Based on the analysis and modeling results, we expanded FD-CIC to account for the GHG emission impacts of mul??-year crop rota??ons. The new version of FD-CIC can generate two types of results: 1) landscape-based LCA results over the two or three years of crop rota??on, in grams of GHG emissions per acre of cropland; and 2) crop-specific LCA results, including soybean-specific CI, under different crop rota??ons, in grams of GHG emissions per bushel (bu) of a specific crop.