The sustainable production of energy is one of the major challenges facing humanity. In recent years, enhancement of energy production from waste biomass has become a pressing issue. This article presents an energetic-environmental analysis of a biogas plant equipped with an internal combustion engine able to work as an energetic system of distributed micro-cogeneration, in order to be able to pursue both the goals of energetic and environmental sustainability. Biogas generation, mainly that of methane and carbon dioxide with traces of other gases, occurs through the process of anaerobic digestion of organic matter. This study of a typical 1-MW power plant assumes it is localized near a livestock farm, where it can be supplied with the main waste biomass produced by the same farm: manure and agricultural biomass. Using Buswell’s chemical model, data of biogas producibility of different organic matrices are compared with data obtained from the plant considered, and an analysis of quality on the composition of the gas produced by the anaerobic process of different organic mixtures is conducted. A general technical and economic analysis is performed to estimate the goodness of the energetic plant, thereby assessing the profit from the processing of the primary organic mixture. An environmental assessment, based on the greenhouse gas balance, aims at the evaluation of benefits resulting from this plant.
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Alice et al. (2014) studied this question.
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