Emergy analysis using US economic input–output models with applications to life cycles of gasoline and corn ethanol

A commonly encountered challenge in emergy analysis is the lack of transformity data for many economic products and services. To overcome this challenge, emergy analysts approximate the emergy input from the economy via a single emergy/money ratio for the country and the monetary price of economic inputs. This amounts to assuming homogeneity in the entire economy, and can introduce serious uncertainties in the results. This paper proposes and demonstrates the use of a thermodynamically augmented economic input–output model of the US economy for obtaining sector-specific emergy to money ratios that can be used instead of a single ratio. These ratios at the economy scale are more accurate than a single economy-wide emergy/money ratio, and can be obtained quickly for hundreds of economic products and services. Comparing sector-specific emergy/money ratios with those from conventional emergy studies indicates that the input–output model can provide reasonable estimates of transformities at least as a stop-gap measure until more detailed analysis is completed. A hybrid approach to emergy analysis is introduced and compared with conventional emergy analysis using life cycles of corn ethanol and gasoline as examples. Emergy and transformity data from the hybrid approach are similar to those from conventional emergy analysis, indicating the usefulness of the proposed approach. In addition, this work proposes the metric of return on emergy investment for assessing product alternatives with the same utility such as transportation fuels. The proposed approach and data may be used easily via web-based software.