Life cycle environmental impacts of a prospective palm-based biorefinery in Parà State-Brazil

The availability of about 18 million hectares of grassland in Para State, Brazil, and the possibility of increasing the livestock density display a good perspective for the oil palm expansion in pasture land. A life cycle assessment is performed for a prospective palm-based biorefinery to view two regional and one global environmental impact and the consequences of the land-use change in terms of GHG emissions. Oil palm cultivation in an area of similar to 110,000 hectares of land can annually produce similar to 39,000 tons of bioethanol, similar to 340,000 tons of biodiesel, similar to 268 GW h net electricity and other co-products. The life cycle GHG emissions reduction for biodiesel and bioethanol as compared to fossil diesel and gasoline would be 76.9-79.3% and 83.7-88.6%. The advantage of grassland rehabilitation by oil palm plantation is the removal of similar to 188 t CO2/ha from the atmosphere during the plant lifetime. The entire inflows and outflows for the conversion processes are schemed. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Assessing the life cycle costs and environmental performance of lightweight materials in automobile applications

Christian Ludwig, Jan-Anders Månson, Véronique Michaud, Jérôme Payet, Robert Andrew Witik

Life cycle assessment (LCA) and manufacturing focused life cycle costing are used to evaluate the potential advantages of composites in automotive applications. The life cycle costs and environmental performance of several suitable lightweight polymer composites are quantified and compared against magnesium and steel for a representative component. The results indicate that weight reduction will not always lead to improved environmental performance. Materials offering high weight savings such as carbon fibres and magnesium have been shown to give limited or negative environmental benefits over their life cycles due to increased environmental burdens associated with their production. Lower performance materials such as sheet moulding compounds were found to perform better from a life cycle perspective despite not being recycled. Lighter weight vehicle components were found to be always more costly; however their use did lead to reduced costs for the consumer through lower fuel consumption. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

2011

Life cycle assessment of algae biodiesel and its co-products

Edgard Gnansounou, Jegannathan Kenthorai Raman

There is a need to explore alternative energy sources to meet the future energy demand in a sustainable way. Algae could be a potential feed stock for biodiesel and other co-products such as animal feed and chemicals. Life cycle assessment (LCA) of such production system has to be assessed before any implementation at commercial scale. In this context, a prospective LCA of algae biorefinery considering selected multi-products (biodiesel, protein and succinic acid) was carried out to estimate the environmental impact compared to a reference system. LCA results revealed less CO2 emissions and land use for biodiesel, protein and succinic acid production system compared to that of only biodiesel and protein production system from algae. The impact reduction was even more when compared with conventional diesel, soy protein and fossil based succinic acid system. A higher carbohydrate composition in algae favors less CO2 emissions and fossil fuel consumption in the algae system compared to that of the reference system. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Elsevier2016

Environmental impact assessment of lignocellulosic lactic acid production: Integrated with existing sugar mills

Pavel Vaskan

Lactic acid (LA) is considered for the diversification and value addition to sugar industry in South Africa, through a bioconversion of sugarcane bagasse and leaves. A bioconversion process was modeled in Aspen Plus (R) V8.6 and its environmental impacts were evaluated using the Life Cycle Assessment method using SimaPro (R) considering its integration into existing South African Sugar mills. The life cycle approach took into account the whole sugar production chain, including sugarcane cultivation stage, harvesting and transportation of sugarcane, sugar mill, and LA production. The life cycle inventories of the sugarcane cultivation and sugar mill were obtained from literature while Aspen Plus (R) simulation data were used for the LA production. The ecoinvent database of SimaPro (R) was used for all external inputs and fossil-based LA production. Environmental impacts of the biobased and fossil based LA productions were assessed and compared. The total environmental savings of the major impact categories obtained upon replacing a tonne of fossil-based LA with biobased LA are: 3925.65 kg CO2 eq. of global warming potential; 1742.05 kg fossil fuel eq. of abiotic depletion potential; 1296.16 kg 1,4-DB eq. of human toxicity potential; 397.79 kBq U-235 eq. of ionizing radiation potential; 253.97 kg Fe eq. of metal depletion potential; 43.48 kg 1,4-DB eq. of marine aquatic ecotoxicity potential; 42.97 kg 1,4-DB eq. of fresh water aquatic ecotoxicity potential and 18.23 kg SO2 eq. of acidification potential. Auxiliary chemicals used in the biobased LA production are most relevant to the total environmental impacts. Thus, biobased LA production has significantly reduced the impact on the environment, giving 80-99% environmental savings compared to fossil-derived LA. (C) 2016 Institution of Chemical Engineers. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Institution of Chemical Engineers2016

Environmental impact assessment of lignocellulosic lactic acid production: Integrated with existing sugar mills

Pavel Vaskan

Institution of Chemical Engineers2016