Division Forest, Nature and Landscape, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Leuven, Belgium.
Environ Sci Technol. 2011 Jun 15;45(12):5447-53. doi: 10.1021/es200257m. Epub 2011 May 17.
In addition to available country or site-specific life cycle studies on Jatropha biodiesel we present a generic, location-independent life cycle assessment and provide a general but in-depth analysis of the environmental performance of Jatropha biodiesel for transportation. Additionally, we assess the influence of changes in byproduct use and production chain. In our assessments, we went beyond the impact on energy requirement and global warming by including impacts on ozone layer and terrestrial acidification and eutrophication. The basic Jatropha biodiesel system consumes eight times less nonrenewable energy than conventional diesel and reduces greenhouse gas emissions by 51%. This result coincides with the lower limit of the range of reduction percentages available in literature for this system and for other liquid biofuels. The impact on the ozone layer is also lower than that provoked by fossil diesel, although eutrophication and acidification increase eight times. This study investigates the general impact trends of the Jatropha system, although not considering land-use change. The results are useful as a benchmark against which other biodiesel systems can be evaluated, to calculate repayment times for land-use change induced carbon loss or as guideline with default values for assessing the environmental performance of specific variants of the system.
除了现有的关于麻疯树生物柴油的国家或特定地点的生命周期研究外，我们还提出了一种通用的、与地点无关的生命周期评估，并对麻疯树生物柴油在运输方面的环境性能进行了全面但深入的分析。此外，我们还评估了副产品用途和生产链变化的影响。在评估中，我们不仅考虑了对能源需求和全球变暖的影响，还包括了对臭氧层、陆地酸化和富营养化的影响。基本的麻疯树生物柴油系统消耗的不可再生能源比传统柴油少八倍，温室气体排放量减少 51%。这一结果与文献中该系统和其他液体生物燃料的减排百分比范围的下限相吻合。对臭氧层的影响也低于化石柴油，尽管富营养化和酸化增加了八倍。本研究调查了麻疯树系统的一般影响趋势，尽管没有考虑土地利用变化。这些结果可用作基准，以评估其他生物柴油系统，计算因土地利用变化导致的碳损失的偿还期，或作为评估系统特定变体的环境性能的默认值指南。
