LCA applied to elucidate opportunities for biogas from wastewaters in Colombia

Abstract

Biogas produced in municipal and industrial wastewater treatment facilities (BWWF) is a resource wasted in several socio-economic contexts. BWWF-based projects are compared against energy projects using conventional electricity or natural gas (NG), following strict economic considerations that usually tip the balance in favour of conventional energy supply. This is because the economic gain associated with the environmental benefits of using small biogas sources like BWWF does not overcome the technical and financial effort required in these types of project. This paper shows a broader application of life cycle assessment (LCA) methodology to explore opportunities for positive (or effective) utilization of BWWF in the Colombian context. LCA has been used to evaluate the supply-chain of NG which is the direct competitor of BWWF, in three different Colombian regions, in order to identify those where higher NG environmental impacts offer increased environmental added-value to BWWF use. LCA was also applied to study two BWWF valorization scenarios in the poultry processing industry. It shows how valorization options for BWWF are more realistic and effective when specific-regional loads are applied to the environmental assessment of NG supply-chain and BWWF valorization.

Life cycle assessment of wastewater treatment in developing countries: A review

“…Europe (e.g. Mahgoub et al, 2010;Roushdi et al 2012;Meneses-Jácome et al, 2015;Wang et al, 2015;Lu et al, 2017) or Japan (Limphitakphong et al, 2016)) have been used due to the absence of more specific information. Moreover, Kalbar et al (2013Kalbar et al ( , 2014 and…”

Life Cycle Sustainability Evaluation of Potential Bioenergy Development for Landfills in Colombia

“…The AD stage includes the transport of the sorted FW by municipal waste collection vehicles to the treatment plant, which is assumed to be located just beside the Mondonedo landfill with an estimated distance of 30 km (round trip), similarly to the one reported for the Colombian geography at [9]. The AD plant consists of 5 sets of 2 biodigesters in series -with the sets in parallel -each with a working volume of 7000 m 3 .…”

“…An electrical efficiency of 38 % and 46 % for thermal energy, a methane's low heating value (LHV) of 10 kWh/m 3 and a capacity factor of 8030 h/year have been assumed considering values reported in [9], [37]. The modelled installed capacity (2 MW) fits the requirements to produce the calculated electricity and heat outputs of 10 318 and 12 490 MWh/year, respectively (before losses and meeting internal demands).…”

“…In this context, the present work seeks to quantify the environmental, economic, and social impacts of an energy generation project from landfilled biowastes in Colombia using Life Cycle Thinking (LCT) tools. This specific methodology has already been used for similar projects in the geographical context, such as the case of the environmental Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) for biogas production from wastewaters in Colombia [9] or the sustainability evaluation of different paths for wastewater treatments in Brazil [10]. In [11], the methane biochemical potential from organic wastes in Colombia landfills is explored in a municipal solid waste management process.…”

Energy Integration in Wastewater Treatment Plants by Anaerobic Digestion of Urban Waste: A Process Design and Simulation Study

“…Schütze et al [24] made a comparative evaluation of four commercially available treatment plant simulation tools and concluded that out of the four programs under investigation (BIOWIN ® , ESP ® , GPS-X ® , and STOAT ® ), GPS-X ® was the one most closely meeting the requirements defined by the water company. Apart from its implementation in real-scale plants for optimization and control purposes, it has been widely used as a tool for analysis of the performance of wastewater treatment plants in a number of published papers that demonstrate the potential use of this software [27] to simulate nutrient removal processes in WWTP [25,[28][29][30], as well as to simulate anaerobic digestion [31][32][33][34]. However, for energetic and economic considerations, a more generalized software called SuperPro ® v.2.7 [35] was successfully implemented in a wide range of industries such as biopharmaceutical [36,37], cellulosic ethanol [38], biodiesel [39], and bioenergy systems [40,41]; thus, it was selected for energetic calculations of the scenarios studied in the present work.…”