Sheetal Bangalore ’25, Operations Research and Financial Engineering

Sheetal Bangalore ’25

Major

Operations Research and Financial Engineering

Project Title

Building MACRO-Biomass: Optimizing Bioenergy Generation Within Existing Energy Sectors

Presentation Link

View Sheetal's Presentation

Minor(s): French

With society’s increasing focus on sustainable energy alternatives, optimization tools are becoming more critical in the process. Optimizing cost and CO₂ emissions across various energy sectors, the MACRO model — developed by the Princeton University ZERO Lab, the MIT Energy Initiative and NYU Tandon — contributes to a sustainable future. My work from May to July 2024 focused on the development of a new component of the MACRO model which incorporates bioenergy — an energy source that produces net-zero emissions. However, when combined with carbon capture and storage (CCS), bioenergy results in negative emissions. Technologies that couple these two are vital in reducing climate change and are known as bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) technologies. MACRO-Biomass allows the co-optimization of bioenergy generation, both with and without carbon capture, in conjunction with the other energy sectors that are already coded into MACRO. To build and test the MACRO-Biomass model, I analyzed the Billion-Ton Report by cleaning the data of biomass availability, generating cost-supply curves, applying stoichiometry conversions and using optimization programming. Efforts to integrate bioenergy into models such as MACRO are essential for developing ideal emissions policies. I hope to continue working on this impactful project in the upcoming year.