Title:
Life Cycle Analysis of Short Rotation Coppice through the Example of Eucalyptus and Poplar for Bioenergy in France
Author(s):
Nguyen Thé, N., Maupu, P., Gabrielle, B., Vial, E.
Document(s):
Paper
Abstract:
Numerous international and French policies are nowadays promoting renewable energy sources such as biomass. Among possible sources (waste, forest, straw, etc.), dedicated energy crops such as Short Rotation Coppice (SRC) are being studied. Grown on agricultural lands, they enable the production of a well qualified biomass under easy harvestable conditions and give the opportunity to reduce possible competition with other forest resource utilizations. Beside technical, social and economical aspects, environmental issues are now important to take into account. For this purpose, a Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) was implemented for an accurate assessment of all the flows that contribute to the production of 1 GJ of heat energy from SRC wood ships. The tool was applied to various scenarios of poplar and eucalyptus SRC, based on the well known SRC pulp scheme and more theoretical recently adapted systems of Very Short Rotation Coppice (VSRC) for energy. The global results show a positive impact of the different scenarios in terms of energy gain and reduction of Green House Gas (GHG) emissions. Ship transportation represents the most important parts of the energy consumption and GHG emissions. The second important one is fertilization, in the case of intensive VSRC schemes with harvest every 2 or 3 years and all the more since evergreen species such as eucalyptus should be used. Another issue of the LCA was to integrate the carbon sequestered in the biomass by affecting a weighting factor (or equivalence factor) to take into account the temporal value of C sequestration. This was studied through the example of eucalyptus SRC in southern France by integrating comparative carbon storage versus a baseline constituted by wild land after vine yard picking. In this situation, SRC would lead to a benefit of 30 to 130 t CO2/ha in 30 years, depending on the equivalence factor used.
Keywords:
short rotation forestry (SRF), life cycle analysis, carbon storage
Topic:
Biomass resources
Subtopic:
Environmental and socio-economic aspects for biomass resources
Event:
18th European Biomass Conference and Exhibition
Session:
OC1.1
Pages:
91 - 97
ISBN-13:
978-88-89407-56-1
ISBN-10:
88-89407-56-5
Paper DOI:
10.5071/18thEUBCE2010-OC1.1
Price:
FREE
