EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Diversifying the technological strategies for recovering bioenergy from the two-phase anaerobic digestion of sugarcane vinasse: An integrated techno-economic and environmental approach

Lucas Tadeu Fuess, Bruno Colling Klein, Mateus Ferreira Chagas, Mylene Cristina Alves Ferreira Rezende, Marcelo Loureiro Garcia, Antonio Bonomi and Marcelo Zaiat

Renewable Energy, 2018, vol. 122, issue C, 674-687

Abstract: Technical, economic and environmental aspects of implementing two-phase anaerobic digestion (AD), i.e., acidogenic + methanogenic systems, in sugarcane biorefineries for the treatment of vinasse were assessed based on different strategies to using the hydrogen-rich biogas (biogas-H2) generated via acidogenesis. Phase separation greatly enhanced the bioenergy recovered from vinasse AD compared with single-phase systems (methanogenic phase exclusively). The best results for generating electric energy were observed in combined cycle-based power plants that utilized biohythane (10.8 MW + 5.5 MW for the harvest and inter-harvest, respectively), which is the gaseous biofuel from blending biogas-H2 with the methane-rich stream from the methanogenic phase (biogas-CH4). Moreover, the results of this study indicated that scaling up two-phase AD systems is economically feasible for the treatment of sugarcane vinasse (net present value = USD 208.58–219.86 million) because a better or equivalent economic performance was attained compared with single-phase processes. Optimizing the alkalinization of methanogenic reactors strongly affected both the economic and environmental performance of the process, with better results observed with the use of low sodium hydroxide dosages (4 g NaOH kg−1COD). In summary, our results highlighted that two-phase biodigestion may enhance energy production from vinasse by 20–30% without impairing the profitability of the biorefinery and could lead to slight improvements in the environmental performance of the ethanol production chain via the use of an optimized alkalinization strategy.

Keywords: Two-phase biodigestion; Sugarcane vinasse; Techno-economic assessment; Life cycle assessment; Bioenergy recovery (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960148118301393
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:renene:v:122:y:2018:i:c:p:674-687

DOI: 10.1016/j.renene.2018.02.003

Access Statistics for this article

Renewable Energy is currently edited by Soteris A. Kalogirou and Paul Christodoulides

More articles in Renewable Energy from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu (repec@elsevier.com).

 
Page updated 2024-12-28
Handle: RePEc:eee:renene:v:122:y:2018:i:c:p:674-687