Life Cycle Assessment of Biodiesel Produced from Waste Cooking Oil
Date
2017-05-11
Authors
Shurafa’a, Lama
Shattawi, Marah
Sawaftah, Sajedah
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Abstract
Biodiesel has attracted considerable attention as a renewable, biodegradable, and nontoxic fuel and can contribute to solving the energy problems, significantly reducing the emission of gases which cause global warming.
In this project the process of producing biodiesel was analyzed in addition to the use process. The raw material used was waste cooking oil in order to produce 1 kg of the biodiesel by transesterification, including a life cycle analysis for this type of biodiesel followed by an impact assessment analysis using Openlca program with ecoinvent database. The results show the main effect of producing 1 kg of biodiesel and it was the methanol with 0.149 kg of CO2 eq. in contrary with vegetable oil which had a good impact on environment and absorbed approximately 2.66kg of CO2 eq. in the plant’s lifetime not differing much in using electricity generated from natural gas power plant , in addition to that comparing these results with the production phase of petro-diesel at refinery as it produced 0.5 kg of CO2eq. , another environmental indicator was affected was the depletion of resources as it was found approximately 11 MJ for biodiesel and 51 MJ for petro-diesel. In the use phase it was clearly the biodiesel is more friendly on the environment from emissions aspect as the it has lower kg of CO2 and SO2 eq. per year of using the fuel for 5 hours a day .
These results demonstrate how biodiesel is superior and friendlier to environment comparing it with petro-diesel. As it’s recommended to have more accurate and strict results to include the disposal phase of biodiesel in order to get new data inventory to analyze how it does affect the environment, along with an economic analysis for both fuels.