Spatial analysis of United States ethanol production infrastructure vulnerability to flooding
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Coupled Natural and Human Systems
- Keywords
- Risks/Hazards, Vulnerability, GIS
- Copyright
- © 2014 Chen et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ PrePrints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2014. Spatial analysis of United States ethanol production infrastructure vulnerability to flooding. PeerJ PrePrints 2:e394v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.394v1
Abstract
Early-growing season, long duration floods are harmful to the cultivation of maize, the source of 80% of the US bioethanol fuel. Due to the centrality of this industry to US government efforts to bolster domestic energy production, Midwest flooding has implications for US energy production. This paper uses spatial statistics to characterize the spatial distribution of ethanol plants relative to maize production in twelve Midwestern US states which account for approximately 90% of US corn production. County-based territories are delineated for each of the 176 plants in these states, and the total maize production and average annual production are summed for each plant. Multi-decadal flooding data from the Dartmouth Flood Observatory (1982-2007) are used in conjunction with data from the US Department of Agriculture National Agricultural Statistical Service to derive flood risk levels for each plant, and for total production capacity in the region.
Author Comment
Thoughts and feedback would be appreciated.