Principle of Life Cycle Assessment and Cumulative Exergy Demand for Biodiesel Production: Farm-To-Combustion Approach

Decreasing petroleum sources and growing requests for emission attributes of fossil fuel combustion and energy lead to researches on clean, accessible, and inexpensive energy resources. On the other hand, environmental burden that is imposed on nature through biodiesel production and its combustion has also been considered in recent years. Previous studies also focused on the production process and sometimes the exhaust emissions. However, in order to adopt the right policies, a comprehensive analysis requires a review of the entire process from farm-to-combustion. Besides, environmental studies without considering the energy consumption cannot indicate the efficiency of the produced biodiesel. Therefore, the cumulative exergy demand (CExD) method, as a new approach in determining the amount of useful energy consumed in systems, has been used for several years and the lack of this approach can be seen in the study of biofuel production. Accordingly, in this chapter, all stages of biodiesel production from cradle-to-grave including agricultural phase, oil extraction, biodiesel production, combustion and finally power generation are studied from life cycle assessment (LCA) and CExD point of view. Moreover, all these steps along with how to interpret the results are explained with examples.