Key Barriers to the Adoption of Biomass Gasification in Burkina Faso

Abstract

The industrial sector in Burkina Faso faces two significant energy challenges access to efficient energy sources that are also renewable. Pyrolysis and gasification are emerging as conversion pathways that exploit available agricultural and industrial biomass. Pyrolysis has been adopted successfully, whereas gasification failed without getting beyond the experimental stage. This article assesses potential barriers to the adoption of gasification based on interviews with the stakeholders of the energy sector (users, NGOs, policy makers). We use pyrolysis as a benchmark to point out the barriers to adoption. The hierarchical analysis process (AHP) method was applied to identify the most significant barriers to the adoption of gasification. Twenty-seven barriers were identified and prioritized in two dimensions and five categories “technical”, “economic and financial”, “socio-cultural and organizational”, “political, governmental and institutional”, and “ecological and geographical” barriers. The category of socio-cultural and organizational barriers emerged as the most critical in the adoption of gasification. This category deserves special consideration to go past the pilot installation stage and adopting this technology.

A mini-review of biomethane valorization: Managerial and policy implications for a circular resource

“…The decision-making models are useful to resolve all processes in which multiple factors are compared in order to identify the most optimal solution. The AHP approach is widely used in the biomass energy field (Barry et al, 2021; Reißmann et al, 2018), since as demonstrated by Saaty (1980), it identifies a list of priorities obtained through pairwise comparisons based on expert judgments. In particular, several papers highlight that AHP is useful for investigating environmental issues (Hermann et al, 2007; Ilicali and Giritli, 2020).…”

Assessment of biomass energy barriers towards sustainable development: Application of Pythagorean fuzzy AHP

“…The results reveal that the financial obstacle is the utmost noteworthy, subsequent institutional, technical, and socio-cultural groups. Barry et al (2021) evaluated the main hurdles to biomass gasification implementation, taking Burkina Faso as a case study. The AHP technique was used to identify 27 barriers into five distinct groups.…”

“…Mukeshimana et al (2021) categorized the barriers into a total of 20 barriers under the four major categories. Similarly, Barry et al (2021) identify 27 barriers into five distinct groups (i.e., economic and financial, technological, ecological and geographical, political, governmental and institutional, and socio‐cultural and organizational). Moreover, Ghafoor et al (2016) identified that the lack of technical empathy through installation and operation contributed to the failure of biogas facilities with lifespan issues.…”

Significance and Challenges of Poultry Litter and Cattle Manure as Sustainable Fuels: A Review

“…Thermochemical conversion methods are stable and more effective, but underutilized in animal waste management [27]. Among them, pyrolysis and gasification have questionable industrial potential due to several operation problems and high investment costs caused by the multi-stage process structure [28][29][30][31][32]. Hence, the anaerobic fermentation, pyrolysis, and gasification are not an issue of the presented review.…”