Title:
External Costs as a Tool to Identify Sustainable Biogas Infrastructure Options on a Regional Scale
Author(s):
Patrizio, P., Leduc, S., Chinese, D., Kraxner, F.
Document(s):
Paper
Poster
Abstract:
When addressing environmental sustainability of alternative energy production technology, such as biogas, life cycle analysis (LCA) represents a widely used approach as it considers several sources of emissions whose different impacts on acidification, soil depletion or human health play an important role in the overall sustainability evaluation. To incorporate environmental effects in the optimization procedure, two complementary methodological streams are followed in literature, namely multicriteria analysis and monetization. The latter method is generally carried out by integrating in energy prices either an emission tax (such as carbon tax or tradable emission permit) or the external costs (i.e. those cost imposed on society by the impact of energy production on human health and on the environment). Such internalization method is receiving a growing interest in decision making especially in supporting policy makers in energy and pollution taxes or subsidies determination. The present work focus on this issue, considering the external cost associated with the biogas production supply chain and with the delivery of its corresponding byproducts. The spatial explicit BeWhere model has been implemented with the biogas technology while external costs have been incorporated in the objective function to assess the environmental impact associated with several steps of the biogas supply chain. Different emission inventory database for the stationary processes (i.e. GEMIS database) have been coupled with their associated emission cost derived from the ExternE project, while the IMPACT database has been used for the transport activities. The results show that biogas is not automatically synonymous with sustainable energy, as differences in environmental performance can be remarkable. In particular, the sensitivity analysis shows that the optimal solution can be highly influenced by the complex combination of the territorial context, including site-specific substrates characterization, location and availability, the local agri-forestry practices, the adopted energy conversion technologies and the presence of specific energy infrastructure supplying the final products.
Keywords:
biomethane, GHG emissions, MILP optimization, biogas supply chain
Topic:
Biomass Policies, Markets and Sustainability
Subtopic:
Environmental impacts of bioenergy
Event:
23rd European Biomass Conference and Exhibition
Session:
4AV.2.29
Pages:
1562 - 1568
ISBN:
978-88-89407-516
Paper DOI:
10.5071/23rdEUBCE2015-4AV.2.29
Price:
FREE
