Life cycle assessment of palm oil biodiesel production in Thailand

Abstract

Biodiesel from palm oil has been considered for partial substitution of diesel fuel for transportation in Thailand. The Government of Thailand recently has set up a production target of 8.5 million liters per day of palm oil-based biodiesel by 2012. Generating biodiesel from palm oil requires a great amount of materials and energy, and during the production process several kinds of emissions are released which adversely affect the environment. Therefore, to quantify and verify the advantages and usefulness of palm oil biodiesel, it is necessary to assess its production from a life cycle point of view. The objective of this paper is to analyze the environmental impacts of palm oil biodiesel from a life cycle assessment (LCA) aspect. The SimaPro software scheme was applied in this study. This study will consider the environmental impacts from 1 liter of palm oil biodiesel; the study is divided into three processs: agriculture, transesterification into biodiesel, and utilization. The agricultural, palm oil production and biodiesel production (transesterification) facilities are all located in Krabi province, in the southern part of Thailand. EDIP method and European databases included in the LCA software SimaPro have been used for the impact calculations. The results of the study show the environmental impact per liter of palm oil biodiesel. This study indicates that the ustilization process has the greatest environmental impact, 52.09% of the total. Next are the production of biodiesel and agricultural procedures, amounting to 41.21% and 6.7%, respectively. The most significant impacts from the system are ozone formation, terrestrial eutrophication, aquatic eutrophication, and acidification. The environmental impacts take place from the emissions of CO and NO2 during combustion.