Environmental life cycle assessment of palm oil based microemulsion biofuels production

Abstract

This study focuses on evaluation of Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions and environmental impacts of micro emulsion (ME) biofuels from different formulations based on life cycle assessment (LCA) approach. The functional unit is set to be one ton of ME biofuel. LCA system boundary was separated into four stages: cultivation, oil extraction, refining and ME stage. The ME biofuels with different formulations had been set for four different scenarios by varying the type and ratio of raw materials used. In addition, other potential environmental impact assessments of ME biofuel including global warming, acidification, eutrophication, ozone layer depletion, abiotic depletion, photochemical oxidation, land use, human toxicity, fresh water aquatic, marine aquatic and terrestrial Eco toxicity were also be evaluated by using commercial software, SimaPro version 7.1 with Eco-indicator 99 (H) and CML 2 baseline 2000 methods. Four different Scenarios evaluated in this study are Scenario I (base case), Scenario II (bio based case), Scenario III (butanol blend case) and Scenario IV (RBDPO case). The GHG emissions results described that Scenario IV contributes to the lowest GHG emissions (1,017 kgCO2) and lowest environmental impacts as the result of using refined bleached deodorized palm oil (RBDPO) in the ME formulation. When RBDPO was used to formulate ME biofuel, the total GHG emission was significantly reduced comparing to base case (1,448 kgCO2). When the emissions of each four scenarios were compared based on the normalized results, Scenario II contributed significantly to some environmental impact categories such as fresh water aquatic Eco toxicity, terrestrial Eco toxicity and eutrophication.