Environmental assessment of bioprocess for biofuel production
Evaluation environnementale d'un procédé de production de bio-carburant
Résumé
The importance of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) as an environmental decision support tool continues to increase rapidly in the recent years. The practice of life cycle assessment has been well documented as a tool for comparing products and processes or comparing various components within a life cycle. Goal definition and scoping as well as interpretation of the inventory results would benefit most from decision analytic approach and methods. Research on the environmental impacts of chemical engineering has gain a lot of popularity and importance but it still needs bundles of improvement and expansion for its implementation in the industrial sector. The present study presents the assessment of a bioprocess located in Africa and evaluates the resulted benefits from the coupling of LCA and CAPE (Computer Aided Process Engineering) concepts, methods and tools. While LCA method is mainly focus on products and raw data collection, our main purpose is to define a LCA (attributional) approach based on process system engineering. We conduct environmental assessment of biofuel production from Jatropha Curcas L. The substitution of conventional fuels (gasoline, diesel) by biofuels is considered to be a potential way to gain environmental sustainability agriculture. The assessment encompasses the cultivation of the crop, the oil extraction stage and finally, the biofuel production stage. For this purpose, norms ISO 14040 and 14044 were followed with the help of MS Excel using CML 2 Baseline methodology. Based on mid-point perspective we provide the first results from the interpretation phase. In the last part, this study demonstrates the sustainability of “2nd generation” biofuels and LCA as a sustainability tool. At the same time, it reveals that transesterification process unit is the most impacting. But we identify the limitations of using a “pure” LCA method. The potential benefits from CAPE domain are discussed and we suggest an improved life cycle approach taking benefit from process system engineering.