Life Cycle Assessment of Resource and Energy Consumption for Production of Biodiesel

Life cycle assessment(LCA) was performed for a biodiesel production process of 30000 t/a that took into account of resource utilization,energy consumption.The land use,water and energy consumption were calculated and evaluated for three feedstocks,namely,rape seed oil,Jatropha curcas L.oil and waste oil.For rape seed oil and Jatropha curcas L.oil the LCA included the planting,harvesting and transportation,pretreatment,biodiesel production,distribution and consumption,while for the waste oil,there was no planting and waste collection occupying the place of harvesting.The land areas required were 13132,3333 and 5 m2/t,the amounts of water consumed were 9063.55,12306.62 and 1.97 m3/t,and amounts of fossil energy consumed were 0.9,0.67 and 0.25 MJ/t for rape seed oil,Jatropha curcas L.oil,and waste oil based biodiesel,respectively.The results showed that the planting and production processes used most of the resources and energy.Waste oil and Jatropha curcas L.oil should be developed as biodesel feedstock in China.The effective way to decrease biodiesel life cycle resource utilization,energy consumption would be to cultivate high quality oil plants,improve the catalyst activity and develop a better transesterification process.