ECONOMIC AND ENERGETIC ANALYSIS OF BIOMASS PRODUCTION SYSTEMS BY MEANS OF WEB APPLICATION: THE GIANT REED CASE

摘要

The production of 2nd generation bioethanol has reached a pilot stage. Some bioethanol plants areunder construction around the world. Among them, one is being built in North-West of Italy by Chemtex. Theplanned yearly production is 40,000 t/year of bioethanol. The crop being selected as biomass is the Giant Reed(Arundo donax), that is a perennial crop; do not require irrigation and its cultivation require much less inputs thancorn for biomass. Farmers need some new information on these new crops for biomass production. Also newinformation is thus requested by the market or by public agencies: energy balance and life cycle analysis of cropcultivation, labor budget, etc. To make comparison between standard biomasses and new ones, there is a need ofstandard data and procedures in order to compare the cultivation systems, and to make all the requested assessment.The authors build a web application to do so within the frame of the IEE Project Bioenergy Farm. The tool allow theuser, in anonymous way, to compute its own crop cultivation costs, including the use of machinery, manpower, andproduction factors in order to compare different farming systems. Both field and logistic operations could beevaluated. Also the energetic balance could be computed. The application represents a step toward thestandardization of data and calculation procedures for working time, energy balance and operation costs. Theapplication is accessible, free of charge, at http://bioenergyfarm.eu. In this paper an energy balance of giant reedcrops, is presented. One farm with 10 fields (80 ha) located north of Turin, Italy, has been used to analyze the giantreed performance. The fields were located between 0.7 km and 14 km. The logistics plays an important role inquantifying the operation costs. For the case of Arundo donax this variation is translated to 90 €/ha between fieldsnext to the farm and the one far from the farm (assuming 23 tDM/ha yield), depicting the importance of incorporatingthe geographical variability of the production system (that diversify the transport operations cost) and the fieldcharacteristics such as field shape, soil conditions etc. Similar analysis will be carried out on Giant Reed, on the samefarm and the comparison will be made among the two crops.