Relating the GWP to the land area provides an alternative method to analyze potential life cycle emissions and has been used in previous studies to compare carbon impacts for a variety of biomass based products.
Results of the land functional unit analysis in this research are used to make comparisons between the two ethanol production pathways.
The land functional unit (GWP savings for ethanol per hectare) calculation performed here is similar to the method reported in Evans et al.
The GWP savings is calculated as follows