Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA) of Different Pretreatment and Product Separation Technologies for Butanol Bioprocessing from Oil Palm Frond

Nazira Mahmud and Kurt A. Rosentrater
Additional contact information
Nazira Mahmud: Department of Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering, Iowa State University, Elings Hall, Ames, IA 50011, USA
Kurt A. Rosentrater: Department of Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering, Iowa State University, Elings Hall, Ames, IA 50011, USA

Energies, 2019, vol. 13, issue 1, 1-21

Abstract: Environmental impact assessment is a crucial aspect of biofuels production to ensure that the process generates emissions within the designated limits. In typical cellulosic biofuel production process, the pretreatment and downstream processing stages were reported to require a high amount of chemicals and energy, thus generating high emissions. Cellulosic butanol production while using low moisture anhydrous ammonia (LMAA) pretreatment was expected to have a low chemical, water, and energy footprint, especially when the process was combined with more efficient downstream processing technologies. In this study, the quantification of environmental impact potentials from cellulosic butanol production plants was conducted with modeled different pretreatment and product separation approaches. The results have shown that LMAA pretreatment possessed a potential for commercialization by having low energy requirements when compared to the other modeled pretreatments. With high safety measures that reduce the possibility of anhydrous ammonia leaking to the air, LMAA pretreatment resulted in GWP of 5.72 kg CO 2 eq./L butanol, ecotoxicity potential of 2.84 × 10 −6 CTU eco/L butanol, and eutrophication potential of 0.011 kg N eq./L butanol. The lowest energy requirement in biobutanol production (19.43 MJ/L), as well as better life-cycle energy metrics performances (NEV of 24.69 MJ/L and NER of 2.27) and environmental impacts potentials (GWP of 3.92 kg N eq./L butanol and ecotoxicity potential of 2.14 × 10 −4 CTU eco/L butanol), were recorded when the LMAA pretreatment was combined with the membrane pervaporation process in the product separation stage.

Keywords: environmental impacts; emissions; global warming potential; LMAA pretreatment; cellulosic butanol (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/13/1/155/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/13/1/155/ (text/html)

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:gam:jeners:v:13:y:2019:i:1:p:155-:d:302891

Access Statistics for this article

Energies is currently edited by Ms. Agatha Cao

More articles in Energies from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().