Sustainability of Methylic and Ethylic Biodiesel Production Routes: Social and Environmental Impacts via Multi-criteria and Principal Component Analyses using Brazilian Case Studies

By Stefano Ferrari Interlenghi, José Luiz de Medeiros and Ofélia de Queiroz Fernandes Araújo

Sustainability of Methylic and Ethylic Biodiesel Production Routes: Social and Environmental Impacts via Multi-criteria and Principal Component Analyses using Brazilian Case Studies presents an innovative, quantitative methodology for the assessment of the social and environmental sustainability of methylic and ethylic production routes. Sections explain the key steps in assessing the social and environmental impacts of biofuel production chains, including an overview of biodiesel properties and its production chains, common metrics for environmental, social and economic impacts, explain sustainability indicator variabilities and detect similarities among different classes of sustainability indicators, and cover techno-economic considerations.

Finally, several appendices provide readers with MATLAB codes for solving Principal Component Analysis and Multi-Criterial Sustainability Analysis problems in the context of biodiesel chains or in the context of agronomy and agronomics. This book is an invaluable reference for anyone working on biofuels and bioenergy, including scientific, technical, management, social, environmental and policy professionals.

• Presents analytical methodologies for the sustainability assessment of biodiesel processes using case studies from the Brazilian biodiesel sector
• Explains Multi-Criteria Sustainability Analysis for ranking technologies and producing chains in terms of environmental and social sustainability from large sets of indicators and statistics
• Provides MATLAB-based examples of Principal Component Analysis and Multi-Criteria Analysis problems
• Offers case studies from the second largest biodiesel chain in the world, Brazil

• Language: English
• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Release date: Aug 6, 2023
• ISBN: 9780443219412

Stefano Ferrari Interlenghi

His research expertise includes Simulation and Modelling; Supersonic Separators; Aspen-HYSYS Unit Operation Extensions; Natural Gas Production Chain; Techno-Economic Process Analyses and Sustainability Assessments.

Book preview

Front Cover for Sustainability of Methylic and Ethylic Biodiesel Production Routes - Social and Environmental Impacts via Multi-criteria and Principal Component Analyses using Brazilian Case Studies - 1st edition - by Stefano Ferrari Interlenghi, José Luiz de Medeiros, Ofélia de Queiroz Fernandes Araújo

Sustainability of Methylic and Ethylic Biodiesel Production Routes

Social and Environmental Impacts via Multi-criteria and Principal Component Analyses using Brazilian Case Studies

Stefano Ferrari Interlenghi

José Luiz de Medeiros

Ofélia de Queiroz Fernandes Araújo

Table of Contents

Cover image

Title page

Copyright

Foreword

Preface

Chapter one. Biodiesel production chain: an introduction

Abstract

1.1 Biodiesel

1.2 Biodiesel production process

1.3 Biodiesel industry in the world

1.4 Biodiesel industry in Brazil

1.5 Final remarks

Chapter Two. Biodiesel production chain: sustainability and metrics

Abstract

2.1 Environmental sustainability

2.2 Economic sustainability

2.3 Social sustainability

2.4 Sustainability assessments

2.5 Biodiesel assessments in the literature

Chapter three. Methods

Abstract

3.1 Scope, objective, and system boundaries

3.2 Environmental data assumptions and sources

3.3 Social data assumptions and sources

3.4 Sustainability indicators

3.5 Multicriteria analysis

3.6 Principal component analysis

Chapter four. Fatty acid methyl ester and fatty acid ethyl ester inventories and sustainability indicators

Abstract

4.1 Inventory matrix compilation

4.2 Sustainability Metrics

4.3 Auxiliary indicators

Chapter five. Sustainability assessment

Abstract

5.1 Multicriteria analysis

5.2 Principal component analysis

Chapter six. Conclusions

Abstract

References

Appendix A. Microdata extraction through R

Appendix B. MATLAB® code for multicriteria sustainability assessment and principal component analysis

Appendix C. FAME chain inventory

Appendix D. FAEE chain inventory

Index

Copyright

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Foreword

Yves Gagnon, Universit de Moncton, Faculté d'ingénierie Edmundston, New Brunswick, Canada

The energy sector is undergoing an important transition to meet the world’s energy needs, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, to support climate change mitigation, and to protect our planet for future generations. A major element of the energy transition is the integration of large-scale renewable energy sources, including bioenergy, in the energy mix of countries.

Bioenergy is the transformation of biomass, derived from recently living organic materials, into electricity, heat, and transportation fuels. Along with wind and solar energy, bioenergy is poised to play a significant role in the energy transition.

In support of the global research community and the commercial bioenergy sector, the Woodhead Series in Bioenergy publishes research- and application-oriented book titles on the topic of bioenergy as it relates to renewable sources of energy. The series covers biological resources, chemical and biological processes, and biomass products for energy production, along with the sustainability of bioenergy, namely, the environmental, social, management, and economic aspects of bioenergy.

Two established researchers, Profs. de Medeiros and Fernandes Araújo, have teamed up with an early career researcher, Dr. Interlenghi, to author a timely book on methodologies to assess quantitatively the social and environmental impacts of methylic and ethylic biodiesel production routes.

Strongly anchored in sustainable development principles and well aligned with several United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, the book provides the reader with analytical methodologies, along with social and environmental metrics and indicators, to assess the sustainability of biodiesel production chains. Building on the extensive experiences in their home country, the authors present various case studies from Brazil, the second largest biodiesel chain in the world, along with providing MATLAB-based examples.

Through its innovative approach to assess complex issues, the book is destined to a broad readership interested or working on the sustainability of biofuels and bioenergy processes in general and on the social and environmental impacts of methylic and ethylic production routes.

Preface

Stefano Ferrari Interlenghi, José Luiz de Medeiros and Ofélia de Queiroz Fernandes Araújo

This book is a result of 3 years of research on the sustainability quantitative aspects of the methanol-based and ethanol-based biodiesel production chains culminating in a multicriterial and principal component analyses of the case study on social and environmental impacts in Brazil. The book was written based on previous research works conducted by the authors on the social and environmental impacts generated by the methylic and the ethylic biodiesel production chains in Brazil.

Since the beginning of the biodiesel manufacture in the last decade of the past century, the sustainability of the biodiesel production chain was always a polemic subject of study, wherein aspects of doubtful sustainability play a certain role such as the utilization of forest lands for soybean plantations, the substitution of food-oriented cultures by biofuel-oriented ones, and the fossil-carbon shadow behind agriculture mechanization, crop transport, and massive fertilizer utilization in biodiesel chains. In spite of these issues, it is clear that the sustainability of biodiesel chains has been improved, either by upgradation of technology with lesser fossil dependence or by utilization of vegetable oils from natural palm forests (e.g., in Brazil) that dismisses mechanization and fertilizer utilization. It is clear that biodiesel has now become a very important component in the world fuel matrix and ranks with bioethanol as the most important renewable fuels worldwide that have real potential of greenhouse gas emission mitigation. Hence, the authors think that the material of this book is sufficiently ripe for publication, taking advantage of the growing role of biodiesel as a worldwide green fuel. Notwithstanding that, the book does not attempt to provide solutions for the social and environmental problems of the methylic and ethylic biodiesel production chains because these socioeconomic environmental issues are too complex and are evolving in time, increasing or decreasing the respective severities according to technology evolution and the cultural and welfare developments of the involved population. Instead, the book evaluates through an original quantitative approach the different impacts of these two biodiesel chains on environmental, economic, and social aspects.

In connection with the abovementioned aspects, this book offers a different, but still quantitative and analytic, point of view of biodiesel chains. The main focus is on the assessment of environmental and social impacts of biodiesel chains that are rapidly spreading throughout the world. This approach is original and does not exist, for now, in the biodiesel chain literature. This is our main motivation for writing this book. Besides, the book has an advanced content such that it can be useful in the hands of graduate students conducting MSc and/or PhD researches.

As a book on environmental and sustainability assessments of renewable biofuel chains, it is naturally aligned with the energy-with-purpose objective of the Elsevier Energy Books because biodiesel is a frontline renewable energy source. As a provider of data and quantitative analyses of renewable fuel production chains regarding social and environmental impacts, the proposed book is naturally aligned with the majority of the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), namely, (1) No Poverty; (2) Zero Hunger; (3) Good Health and Well-Being; (4) Quality Education; (5) Gender Equality; (6) Clean Water and Sanitation; (7) Affordable and Clean Energy; (8) Decent Work and Economic Growth; (9) Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure; (10) Reduced Inequalities; (11) Sustainable Cities and Communities; (12) Responsible Consumption and Production; (13) Climate Action; (14) Life Below Water; (15) Life on Land; (16) Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions; and (17) Partnerships for the Goals. It is easy to see that the SDGs (1), (2), (3), (4), (8), (9), and (10) are directly or indirectly approached in the results of the quantitative social assessments conducted by the book, while SDGs (6), (11), (12), (13), (14), and (15) are directly or indirectly approached in the results of the environmental assessments. In other words, only SDGs (5), (7), (16), and (17) stand outside the book scope.

The book also defines and employs several social and environmental metrics and indicators which can unveil how the pursuit of the social and environmental SDGs is differently affected by the methanol-based and bioethanol-based biodiesel production chains. This is an important original result, which is an exclusive particularity of this book, that is, here, one can quantitatively see how the pursuit of SDGs is benefitted or hindered by the growth of the methylic biodiesel production chain or the ethylic counterpart.

The chapters of this book are interlinked as a succession of independent frameworks, which are reasonably self-contained and internally logically consistent. However, this does not change the fact that there is some interlinkage among chapters, that is, the last chapters may refer several times to the first chapters. Even so, it is recognizable that Chapters 1, 2, 3, and 4 may stand reasonably alone, if necessary. On the other hand, Chapters 5 and 6 make several connections to the first four chapters.

As a whole, the book has an advanced scope that can fulfill the needs of a good part of the audience, particularly that part involved with advanced research on the biodiesel chains; that is, MSc and PhD students of chemistry, chemical engineering, biochemistry, bioengineering, agronomics, agronomy, and sociology. The book develops new analytical techniques that can be used in these contexts, namely,

1. Principal component analysis for explaining sustainability indicator variabilities and detecting similarities among apparently different classes of sustainability indicators, besides finding the practical dimensionality of the space of indicators;

2. Multicriterial sustainability analysis for ranking technologies and producing chains in terms of environmental and social sustainability from large sets of indicators and statistics; and

3. How to process the large sets of data that have to be gathered for the abovementioned principal component and multicriterial analyses regarding the environmental and social impacts of biodiesel producing chains.

The tools provided in the book can help MSc and PhD students in their research programs. Moreover, the book can act as a teaching platform in courses for graduate students attending such MSc and PhD programs. The book also brings software examples (written in MATLAB language) for solving principal component analysis and multicriterial analysis problems in the context of biodiesel chains or in similar agro-industrial contexts. The book is up-to-date; it presents a theoretical approach and a framework of quantitative analyzing tools for methylic and ethylic biodiesel chains and their social and environmental impacts. The scope is worldwide, that is, as the main title says, the theory and methods are applicable to any part of the world in which a biodiesel chain is involved. Only the illustrating case study was performed in the Brazilian biodiesel chains. Several involved figures and Google Earth photos (factories, plantations, and so on) are also related to the Brazilian biodiesel chain.

It must be added that the Brazilian biofuel chain ranks among the largest in the world. Brazil is the second largest producer of bioethanol and biodiesel in the world. That is, Brazil has the second largest biofuel chain in the world.

In other words, despite having only a Brazilian case study—since we have reliable data only for this biodiesel chain—this book, as it precisely is, may be of worldwide interest: primarily, since the analytical tools that are discussed here can be applied to assess any agro-industrial chain in the world; secondly, because the size and the impacts of the Brazilian biodiesel chain in the world are not trivial and can orient the choices of novice biodiesel producers; and, last but not least, because several transnational agro-industries play important roles in this Brazilian chain.

Chapter one

Biodiesel production chain: an introduction

Abstract

This chapter introduces biodiesel production chains exploring the most important general aspects of biodiesel and biodiesel chains such as biodiesel in the climate change context; energy matrix and biodiesel; greenhouse gas emissions and biodiesel; biodiesel chemistry and characterization; biodiesel transesterification; biodiesel tribology aspects; biodiesel types, properties, and characterization; biodiesel versus diesel comparison; biodiesel industry in the world; and biodiesel industry in Brazil with illustrations.

Keywords

Climate change; biodiesel; biodiesel characterization; biodiesel production; biodiesel tribology; biodiesel versus diesel

In one of the last Intergovernmental Panels on Climate Change (IPCC), various climate scenarios were presented, in which the carbon budget was a central theme. The carbon budget can be defined as the cumulative amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) that can still be emitted without excessively accelerating global warming (IPCC, 2014). In order to have a 50% chance of maintaining global temperature increase below 2°C, in what is known as the 2D scenario, an estimated 275 Gt of carbon (or around 1008 Gt of CO2) can still be emitted (IPCC, 2014). Thus, to keep global emissions under the carbon budget, several solutions are being investigated. Since a certain lock-in in fossil energy sources is expected due to excessive capacity and expected returns on capital investment, one possibility is improving fossil performance via carbon capture and storage/utilization (CCS/CCU) and more stringent/efficient conditioning technologies (Araújo et al., 2020). To extend fossil use beyond 2050, Araújo et al. (2020) highlighted the importance of promoting almost closed carbon loops via CO2 capture and reinjection in the short term. On the other hand, extensive use of fossil fuels is unsustainable over long periods of time since even with CCS/CCU or better conditioning, fossil fuels are still expected to increase greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 50% by 2050 (Subramaniam et al., 2020).

As a result, one of the most discussed solutions is transitioning from a fossil-based economy to a bioeconomy, obtaining all types of energy (i.e., power and heat) from renewable and cleaner sources (Padilla-Rivera et al., 2019). Brazil constitutes an interesting case study in the biofuel sector since it has one of the most renewable energy matrices in the world but still has high emissions associated with fossil use (MME, 2020). Fig. 1.1 sketches the energy matrix of Brazil from governmental data for the reference year of 2018. Primary energy supply (PES) totaled 1.21E+10 GJ in the year of 2018 with a drop of 1.7% when compared with 2017 (MME, 2020). PES, as calculated by the Brazilian government, consists of the sum of total available energy in the country eliminating losses due to distribution or during transformation processes (EPE, 2019).

Figure 1.1 Brazilian energy matrix in 2018 with data from MME (2020).

A total of 5.47E+09 GJ of the PES originated in renewable sources in which use of sugarcane derivatives, for both power and heat, and hydropower can be highlighted. This means that 45.3% of the Brazilian PES originates from renewable sources, which is a higher value and an advantage when compared to the 10.6% found in OECD-registered countries or the global mean of 14.3%. Yet, nonrenewables, in which the main constituents are natural gas (NG) and oil, still represent 54.7% of the Brazilian energy matrix, indicating that there is still room to increase biofuel use over traditional fossil fuels.

Interestingly, when analyzing the electricity generation in Brazil by source, as seen in Fig. 1.2, one can clearly see that the contribution of renewable sources is larger than in the PES. In terms of power, a total of 636.4 TWh was produced in Brazil for the reference year of 2018, higher than the 625.7 TWh available in 2017. A 14.4% growth in wind power and 4.8% increase in hydropower are the main differences that can be highlighted between 2017 and 2018. Solar power also grew exponentially during the period but still has a low representativeness in the overall matrix of the country. Fig. 1.2 also demonstrates that use of renewable