Modeling life‐cycle inventory for multi‐product biorefinery

What is it about?

A biorefinery is a complex system that, due to its habitually remote location, needs to construct an extensive infrastructure around its main conversion processes. When such biorefinery is designed to produce more than one output, question might arise concerning the way to allocate environmental burdens to those outputs. One may consider assigning burdens from the entire biorefinery to its products based on some physical or economic parameters of those outputs. However, such approach does not take into account individual conversion routes requiring different services, or the fact that those routes may use such services with different intensity. This means that allocation factors cannot be adjusted simply based on product properties, but they should also take into account the unique biorefinery design. To address this challenge, we might need to track the burdens along biorefinery value chains. In order to accomplish this, we, first, transform the initial technological model into an input-output one, and then use matrix notation to map the transfer of burdens through the entire biorefinery. Using Leontief inverse, we find the cumulative share of burdens to be assigned to each individual stream within our system boundary, including the final product under analysis. Finally, coupling these burdens with the input GHG intensity data, we find GHG profiles of outputs obtained and of all intermediates of interest.

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