Biogas production is an established sustainable process for simultaneous generation of renewable energy and treatment of organic wastes. The increasing interest of utilizing biogas as substitute to natural gas or its exploitation as transport fuel opened new avenues in the development of biogas upgrading techniques. The present work is a critical review that summarizes state-of-the-art technologies for biogas upgrading and enhancement with particular attention to the emerging biological methanation processes. The review includes comprehensive description of the main principles of various biogas upgrading methodologies, scientific and technical outcomes related to their biomethanation efficiency, challenges that have to be addressed for further development and incentives and feasibility of the upgrading concepts.

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This consequential life cycle assessment study highlights the key environmental aspects of producing biogas from separated pig and cow slurry, a relatively new but probable scenario for future biogas production, as it avoids the reliance on constrained carbon cosubstrates. Three scenarios involving different slurry separation technologies have been assessed and compared to a business-as-usual reference slurry management scenario. The results show that the environmental benefits of such biogas production are highly dependent upon the efficiency of the separation technology used to concentrate the volatile solids in the solid fraction. The biogas scenario involving the most efficient separation technology resulted in a dry matter separation efficiency of 87% and allowed a net reduction of the global warming potential of 40%, compared to the reference slurry management. This figure comprises the whole slurry life cycle, including the flows bypassing the biogas plant. This study includes soil carbon balances and a method for quantifying the changes in yield resulting from increased nitrogen availability as well as for quantifying mineral fertilizers displacement. Soil carbon balances showed that between 13 and 50% less carbon ends up in the soil pool with the different biogas alternatives, as opposed to the reference slurry management.

This paper addresses the conversion of Danish agricultural land from food/feed crops to energy crops. To this end, a life cycle inventory, which relates the input and output flows from and to the environment of 528 different crop systems, is built and described. This includes seven crops (annuals and perennials), two soil types (sandy loam and sand), two climate types (wet and dry), three initial soil carbon level (high, average, low), two time horizons for soil carbon changes (20 and 100 years), two residues management practices (removal and incorporation into soil) as well as three soil carbon turnover rate reductions in response to the absence of tillage for some perennial crops (0%, 25%, 50%). For all crop systems, nutrient balances, balances between above-and below-ground residues, soil carbon changes, biogenic carbon dioxide flows, emissions of nitrogen compounds and losses of macro-and micronutrients are presented. The inventory results highlight Miscanthus as a promising energy crop, indicating it presents the lowest emissions of nitrogen compounds, the highest amount of carbon dioxide sequestrated from the atmosphere, a relatively high carbon turnover efficiency and allows to increase soil organic carbon. Results also show that the magnitude of these benefits depends on the harvest season, soil types and climatic conditions. Inventory results further highlight winter wheat as the only annual crop where straw removal for bioenergy may be sustainable, being the only annual crop not involving losses of soil organic carbon as a result of harvesting the straw. This, however, is conditional to manure application, and is only true on sandy soils.