Thursday, April 12, 2018
5:30 p.m.

Memorial Union, Room 109

Biofuels have been proposed as a sustainable alternative to fossil-based fuels. While many studies have indicated that the greenhouse gas emissions from biofuels would be lower than fossil-based fuels, questions about broader aspects of sustainability remain. Focus on biofuels for past two decades has been a real game changer for agricultural commodities. However, in recent years, the overall outlook for advanced biofuels has substantially weakened due to various factors and these trends are expected to continue in next few years. In this talk, we will present an overview studies conducted at Sustainable technologies Laboratory at OSU during last 11 years that look into the technical feasibility, economic viability, environmental impacts and resource sustainability of biofuels. We hope to catalyze a discussion on looking into the conditions where biofuels may/may not be a viable alternative to fossil fuels. Such analyses can provide a basis for science-based policies for sustainable biofuels.

For event questions or accommodation requests, please contact Shelly Signs, (541) 737-0724 or shelly.signs@oregonstate.edu.

Ganti S. Murthy is a professor in Biological and Ecological Engineering Department at Oregon State University. He completed his B.Tech in Agricultural Engineering from NERIST, Arunachal Pradesh and M.Tech in Dairy and Food Engineering from IIT-Kharagpur, India. He then went to pursue PhD in Agricultural and Biological Engineering at Univ. of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and obtained his PhD in Dec., 2006. He joined Oregon State University in 2007.

Dr. Murthy’s research is broadly focused on sustainable bioprocessing. For any proposed technology or policy, Murthy group seeks to answer the question: “Is this approach technically feasible, economically viable, resource sustainable and has lower environmental impacts compared to alternatives? If not, how can we make it so?” His group employs a combination of experimental and theoretical approaches using control theory, systems biology, process modeling, economic analysis and life cycle assessment (LCA) techniques to conduct molecular, cellular, industrial scale and systems level analyses of technologies to establish a sustainable bioeconomy. Recently, Murthy group started researching the nutrient-energy-water nexus at regional and global scale with a particular focus on building the resilience of agro-ecological systems to pulse and pressure disturbances.