A Comparative Life Cycle Assessment Analysis of Liquid Biofuels Production

Nowadays, the majority of the fuel use in transport comes from fossil fuels. Although there was an import of natural gas in public transportation, the gasoline and diesel oil remain the dominant vehicles' driving force. In the European Union it is estimated that almost 21% of the greenhouse gases are produced from the transportation. The oil price continuous increase adds economics constrains besides the environmental problems. The objective of this work is the environmental comparison of the biofuels production routing from four different biomass forms, utilizing the life cycle assessment analysis. The impact category to be investigated is the greenhouse effect while the biomass forms used in the biofuels production is the rapeseed, the sunflower, the wheat and the sugar beet. The life cycle stages under study start at the cultivation and end at the combustion of the produced biofuels in vehicles. Although biofuels require a lot of primary energy from fossil fuels, the sum of produced emissions of equivalent CO2 from them is much smaller.