A quantitative sustainable comparative study of two biogas systems based on energy, emergy and entropy methods in China

He Zhang, Ashish T. Asutosh and Junxue Zhang ()
Additional contact information
He Zhang: University of Florida
Ashish T. Asutosh: University of Florida
Junxue Zhang: Southeast University

Environment, Development and Sustainability: A Multidisciplinary Approach to the Theory and Practice of Sustainable Development, 2022, vol. 24, issue 12, No 7, 13583-13609

Abstract: Abstract In China, as an important source of renewable energy, the standard biogas production module (SBPM) plays a key role and accounts for the majority of biogas production. Given its greater environmental pollution, it is particularly important to assess its quantitative sustainability status for optimizing system design and policy-making. This paper conducted the sustainability assessments of the open-loop standard biogas production module (OL-SBPM) and closed-loop standard biogas production module (CL-SBPM). Compared with the OL-SBPM system, the CL-SBPM system integrates a power generation subsystem. To evaluate two types of systems quantitatively, energy, emergy and entropy methods have been utilized in this study. The results illustrated that only partial indicators are more sustainable in the CL-SBP system rather than all indicators by comparing with the OL-SBPM system, which is contrary to the prevailing view. Taking the information entropy as an example, the equivalent information entropy flow values of the OL-SBPM and CL-SBPM systems are 2.04 × 1025 bits and 1.47 × 1025 bits, respectively, which also demonstrate that the OL-SBPM system has more useful information resulting in higher degree of sustainability. Therefore, these two systems need to be selected according to the existing conditions, rather than the subjective ideation.

Keywords: Biogas production system; Emergy method; Entropy analysis; Sustainability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10668-021-02002-x Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

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:spr:endesu:v:24:y:2022:i:12:d:10.1007_s10668-021-02002-x

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/10668

DOI: 10.1007/s10668-021-02002-x

Access Statistics for this article

Environment, Development and Sustainability: A Multidisciplinary Approach to the Theory and Practice of Sustainable Development is currently edited by Luc Hens

More articles in Environment, Development and Sustainability: A Multidisciplinary Approach to the Theory and Practice of Sustainable Development from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().