Life cycle assessment on electricity generation from palm oil mill effluent

Abstract

Nowadays, the world is dealing with a crisis between the limits of nature and the ambitions of mankind. The climate change issue that been mentioned globally is caused by uncontrollable greenhouse gases emissions from anthropogenic activities. This life cycle assessment study on electricity generation from palm oil mill effluent is important to measure the impacts from the activities to the environment because palm oil effluent is harmful to environment due to high BOD and COD content. Along the process of anaerobic digestion and electricity generation through biogas CHP, a lot of energy (electricity, heat, steam), raw materials and water been used to get a complete product. So, these inputs will contribute to the many categories of environmental impacts. Then, a life cycle assessment is required to perform an impact assessment for this process. The functional unit is production of 1 MWh of electricity produced. This study was modeled by using openLCA Software to develop with addition of Ecoinvent 2.2 Database to reveal the impact of the processes involves towards environment as well as to compare their impact with electricity generation from fossil fuel alternatives. From the study done, it proves that cogenerating electricity from biogas produced by anaerobic digestion by using palm oil mill effluent can lead to significant reduction in most impacts compared to fossil fuel alternatives. This study also includes sensitivity analysis of feedstock used and type of digestate storage.