Life Cycle Assessment and Technoeconomic Analysis of Thermochemical Conversion Technologies Applied to Poultry Litter with Energy and Nutrient Recovery

Abstract

Thermochemical technologies provide promising pathways to recover energy and reduce environmental impacts from biomass wastes. Poultry manure or litter additionally provides an opportunity for recovering and recycling nutrients and producing valuable soil amendments. This study compared the life cycle environmental impacts and technoeconomic performance of six thermochemical technologies for treating poultry litter wasteslow pyrolysis, fast pyrolysis, gasification, hydrothermal liquefaction, hydrothermal carbonization, and supercritical water gasificationwith direct land application. Using life cycle assessment (LCA), the technologies were compared through 15 different environmental impact categories (midpoints) using the IMPACT 2002+ method. On converting the midpoints to damage categories (end points), it was found that these technologies outperformed the conventional land application method with respect to human health (92−149% improvement), climate change impact (15−53% improvement), ecosystem quality (124−160% improvement), and resource depletion (−24−530% improvement). The technoeconomic analysis (TEA) identified carbon price (breakeven of $127/1000 kg CO 2 equiv for slow pyrolysis) and high capital costs as influential parameters for large-scale applications of these technologies. The TEA results were most sensitive to carbon price and transportation distance (0.69 and 0.52% changes in revenue per change in input, respectively).

Comparative life cycle assessment of high performance lithium-sulfur battery cathodes

“…This research uses OpenLCA software ( Kadhum et al., 2018 ), and Ecoinvent 3.6 database (released on September 12, 2019) ( Moreno Ruiz et al., 2019 ; Bora et al., 2020 ), to model the impacts of five different Li–S batteries with potential application in the transportation field. Ecoinvent database provides a reference compact electric passenger car of 920 kg without the battery and a rechargeable prismatic LIB of 262 kg, “LIB reference case” from now on.…”

Waste respirator processing system for public health protection and climate change mitigation under COVID-19 pandemic: Novel process design and energy, environmental, and techno-economic perspectives

“…The inflation is evaluated by using chemical engineering indices of the base-case year and current year [71] , [72] , which are denoted as cepcib and cepcir , respectively. The exponential factor ( scf and scft ) is referred from the relevant literature [42] , [73] , [74] , [75] , [76] . The indirect capital cost ( IC ) and land cost ( LC ) are estimated by 123% and 6% of total equipment procurement cost ( TPEC ) [43] , respectively.…”

“…We refer to the unit cost of transporting RMW ( utw ) as that of transporting waste respirators [77] , which is assumed to remain unchanged across states. The O&M cost ( OMC ) is estimated by 10% of the summation of land cost and equipment installation cost [73] . The property tax and insurance denoted as PT&I ( PTIC ), general expense ( GEC ), and income tax ( TAXC ) are calculated by Eqs.…”

Conversion of biomass to biofuels and life cycle assessment: a review

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