Life cycle assessment of biodiesel from soybean, jatropha and microalgae in China conditions

Abstract

Increasing demand for transport fuels has driven China to attach great importance to biodiesel development. To evaluate the environmental impacts caused by producing and driving with biodiesel made from soybean, jatropha, and microalgae under China conditions, the LCA methodology is used and the assessment results are compared with fossil diesel. The solar energy and CO 2 uptake in biomass agriculture and reduction of dependency on fossil fuels lead to a better performance on abiotic depletion potential (ADP), global warming potential (GWP), and ozone depletion potential (ODP) in the life cycle of biodiesel compared to fossil diesel. Except for ADP, GWP and ODP, producing and driving with biodiesel does not offer benefits in the other environmental impact categories including eutrophication, acidification, photochemical oxidation, and toxicity. Jatropha and microalgae are more competitive biodiesel feedstock compared to soybean in terms of all impacts. By using global normalization references and weighting method based on ecotaxes, the LCA single score for the assessed 10 mid-point impact categories of soybean, jatropha, and microalgae based biodiesel is 54, 37.2 and 3.67 times of that of fossil diesel, respectively. Improvement of biomass agriculture management, development of biodiesel production technologies, bettering energy structure and promoting energy efficiency in China are the key measures to lower environmental impacts in the life cycle of biodiesel in the future. Various sensitivity analyses have also been applied, which show that, choice of allocation method, transport distance, uncertainty in jatropha and microalgae yield and oil content, and recycling rate of harvest water of microalgae have significant influence on the life cycle environmental performance of biodiesel.

Life Cycle Assessment of Biodiesel Production from Microalgae: A Mass and Energy Balance Approach in Order to Compare Conventional with in Situ Transesterification

“…The pollutants released from the production of electricity consist mostly of heavy metals (41.3%) such as arsenic (+V) and selenium, inorganic emissions to air (23.2%) and organic emissions to air (23.5%) for in situ transesterification. This result is in agreement with findings in earlier studies [27] that emissions of heavy metals are responsible for human toxicity.…”

“…GaBi revealed that NH 3 is the major pollutant leading to the effect of eutrophication. Similar findings have been observed in earlier studies [27]. From Fig.…”

“…A stage contribution analysis of the GaBi results showed that electricity production is the sole key contributor to human toxicity. This result conforms to earlier findings [27]. The pollutants released from the production of electricity consist mostly of heavy metals (41.3%) such as arsenic (+V) and selenium, inorganic emissions to air (23.2%) and organic emissions to air (23.5%) for in situ transesterification.…”

Evaluating the environmental sustainability of energy crops: A life cycle assessment of Spanish rapeseed and Argentinean soybean cultivation

“…The same occurs with studies on soybean LCA that have been carried out to date (e.g. Kim & Dale, 2009;Panichelli et al, 2009;Hou et al, 2011;Mohammadi et al, 2013). Moreover, most previous studies were limited to energy and GHG emissions, thus excluding other environmental impacts that are relevant throughout the agricultural process.…”

Sensitivity of Technical Choices on the GHG Emissions and Expended Energy of Hydrotreated Renewable Jet Fuel from Microalgae

“…These parameters are algae productivity and oil content on dry mass of algae [33], and algae concentration in ponds. Here, we conduct a Monte-Carlo analysis testing the distribution of each parameter one by one in order to evaluate its influence on GHG emissions result of the entire system.…”