Tobacco stalks as a sustainable energy source in civil sector: Assessment of techno-economic and environmental potential

Piero Bareschino, Elisa Marrasso and Carlo Roselli

Renewable Energy, 2021, vol. 175, issue C, 373-390

Abstract: Tobacco is traditionally used for cigarettes and cigars manufacturing and after the drying process a great quantity of dry tobacco stalks is treated as waste. In this framework, the scope of the paper is to examine the use of tobacco stems to feed a biomass boiler after a chipping process. The study is focused on southern Italy area thus, firstly, the assessment of tobacco availability in Italy and Campania region has been determined. Then, Burley tobacco stalks sampled out in an air-curing factory of south Italy crop have been characterized according to ASTM D5142 and ASTM D5373 standards. Thereby, biomass and natural gas fuelled boilers have been compared through an energy, environmental and economic analysis on simulative basis. Both systems satisfy the thermal energy demands of a multi-purpose condominium located in a cold Italian climatic zone near the factory. The results have demonstrated that boiler fed by tobacco chips ensures environmental and economic advantages compared to traditional system. In particular, it guarantees a reduction of CO2 emissions up to 16.59 tCO2 in one of investigated scenarios and a simple payback period and a net present value of about 5.6 years and 17,168 € (without economic support), respectively.

Keywords: Tobacco stems; Sustainable biofuel thermogravimetric analysis; Techno-economic analysis; Carbon-dioxide emissions evaluation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960148121006212
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:175:y:2021:i:c:p:373-390

DOI: 10.1016/j.renene.2021.04.101

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 ().