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Volume 9
Journal of Bioremediation & Biodegradation
ISSN: 2155-6199
Biofuel Congress 2018 &
Biomass 2018
September 04-06, 2018
JOINT EVENT
September 04-06, 2018 | Zurich, Switzerland
13
th
Global Summit and Expo on
Biomass and Bioenergy
&
12
th
World Congress on
Biofuels and Bioenergy
Ex-ante
and ex-post sustainability evaluation of a biorefinery: Lessons learned from jatropha biodiesel
in Yucatan, Mexico
Julio C Sacramento Rivero
1
, Amarella Estmond-Spencer
1
, Javier Becerril García
1
and
Sam Sweitz
2
1
Universidad Autonoma de Yucatan, Mexico
2
Michigan Technological University, USA
T
he concept of sustainability is implicit in the definition of a biorefinery. Life cycle thinking as well as environmental, social,
and economic assessments are intrinsic to a sustainability evaluation. There is an abundance of methods and indicators
to perform sustainability evaluations; the more approaches are used, the better will be the understanding of the interlinkages
between the issues in this multidimensional problem. In this work, we present two approaches to the sustainability evaluation
of jatropha plantations for biofuels in Yucatan, Mexico. The
ex-ante
evaluation was performed during the early implementation
of the project, from a biorefinery-process design perspective. The ex-post evaluation was performed after the fourth and final
year of the project, heavily based on interviews and surveys with relevant stakeholders, and a life-cycle assessment. The
ex-ante
evaluation predicted potentially positive results from the biorefinery system, with all indicators in the social and economic
categories within sustainable limits; the environmental performance of the system was sustainable only if the jatropha biomass
was refined into a range of valuable co-products in addition to biodiesel. The ex-post evaluation was performed after four
years of the project. At that time it was clear that the project had failed due to unrealistic, over-optimistic predictions of
seed yields from the plantations that were established with very little knowledge of the crop. This inevitably resulted in the
plantations being significantly downsized and the projects going back to the R&D stage. Interestingly, one of the companies
obtained a sustainability certification from the Roundtable for Sustainable Biomaterials a few months before shutting down.
The economic benefits to jatropha workers were significant and positive for both household income and local economies. If the
issues with seed productivity and plant management had been well thought out from the beginning, the jatropha projects, they
would have been of great value to the local communities.
Figure 1.
Summary the sustainability evaluation. Indicators are normalized for attaining values between zero and one when in sustainable conditions.
Recent Publications
1. Navarro-Pineda FS, Ponce D, Sacramento-Rivero JC, Barahona Pérez LF (2017). An economic model for estimating the
viability of biodiesel production from
Jatropha curcas
L. J Chem Technol Biotechnol 92(5):971-980.
2. Sacramento Rivero JC, Eastmond-Spencer A, Becerril García J, Navarro-Pineda F (2016). A three dimensional sustainability
evaluation of jatropha plantations in Yucatan, Mexico. Sustainability 8:1316.
3. Sacramento-Rivero JC, Navarro-Pineda FS, Vilchiz-Bravo, LE (2016). Evaluating the sustainability of biorefineries at the
conceptual design stage. Chem Eng Res Des 107:167-180.
4.
Navarro-Pineda FS, Baz-Rodríguez SA, Handler R, Sacramento-Rivero JC (2016). Advances on the processing of
Jatropha
curcas
towards a whole-crop biorefinery. Renewable Sustainable Energy Rev 54:247-269
Julio C Sacramento Rivero et al., J Bioremediat Biodegrad 2018, Volume 9
DOI: 10.4172/2155-6199-C1-014