Agro Fossil Free - Methodology for the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) in combustion processes where the fuel is pelleted agricultural biomass

General Description

Colombia, due to privileged geographical location, has a great biodiversity, with agriculture being the one of the main source of income for the country. Each year produced large amounts of residual agricultural biomass that can be used to generate energy, since it has a high calorific potential, which could remedy one of the great needs of the country because 60% of country area have not connected with national electric energy service, these are called non-interconnected zones of the country. One possibility to generate electrical energy by using this type of biomass is combustion processes (via traditional way of power generation). This thermochemical process can take advantage of the caloric power of biomass more efficiently, if it is treated with a densification processes such as pelletizing and compacting. Unfortunately densification processes for local biomass are not enough studied in Colombia, consequently to implement them must be evaluated its technical, economic and environment viability. Therefore it is very important to implement a life cycle assessment (LCA) for densified biomass combustion process, specially taking into account that LCA researches for this type of biomass are not reported in literature. Therefore, the biomass energy projects carried out in the country were taken as process object of study, in order to provide a specific methodology for the LCA in combustion processes where the fuel is local pelleted biomass and the goal is the technical and environment improvement of the existing processes, thus, proposing a efficient and sustainable solution to the energy problem of non-interconnected zones in Colombia. The analysis of the process under research has determined a methodology which consists a study of the efficiency of the transport of the bio-mass from its collection to the place of process itself, taking into account aspects such as type of vehicle, amount transported biomass, it physicochemical composition, transportation between operating units, mass balance in the pelletizing process, energy balance in the furnace and the variation of temperature in order to achieve the maximum energy production.