Life cycle assessment of agricultural biogas production systems
- Publication Type
- Contribution to conference
- Authors
- Lansche J; Müller J
- Year of publication
- 2010
- Published in
- Proceedings of the XVIIth World Congress of the International Commission of Agricultural Engineering (CIGR)
- Page (from - to)
- 1-7
- Conference name
- XVIIth World Congress of the International Commission of Agricultural Engineering (CIGR) - Section IV: Rural Electricity and Alternative Energy Sources
- Conference location
- Quebec City (Canada)
- Conference date
- 13-17 June 2010
Climate change is one of the main challenges mankind has to face in the 21st century. Significant contributions to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions are caused by agricultural activities. One effective way to reduce agricultural emissions is the implementation of liquid manure to produce biogas. Applying this technique greenhouse gas emissions from manure storage are avoided and renewable energy in terms of heat and electricity is generated in combined heat and power plants. The objective of this study was to assess the environmental impacts of biogas production systems based on the methods of life cycle assessment. A comparison to the traditional use of agricultural manures and conventional energy production was included. A model was designed to evaluate the biogas production systems according their environmental impact using Gabi 4.3 software. Besides global warming potential other impact categories have been used for the evaluation of the systems effects in the field of eutrophication and acidification. The results show that environmental benefits can be obtained in regard to the emission of greenhouse gases when comparing electricity production from biogas with the typical German marginal electricity mix.