A Web-Based Tool for Energy Balance Estimation in Multiple-Crops Production Systems

• Published in: Sustainability 2017, Vol.9 (5), p.789
• Main Authors: Busato, Patrizia, Sopegno, Alessandro, Berruto, Remigio, Bochtis, Dionysis, Calvo, Angela
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Biogas; Biomass; Biomass energy production; Case studies; Chains; Crop production; Crop rotation; Crops; Cultivation; Decisions; Design analysis; Design engineering; Dispersion; Energy balance; Energy requirements; Energy storage; Harvesting; Machinery and equipment; Operations management; Sustainability; Transportation
• ISSN: 2071-1050; 2071-1050
• DOI: 10.3390/su9050789

Biomass production systems include multiple-crops rotations, various machinery systems, diversified operational practices and several dispersed fields located in a range of distances between the various facilities (e.g., storage and processing facilities). These factors diversify the energy and cost requirements of the system. To that effect, assessment tools dedicated a single-crop production based on average standards cannot provide an insight evaluation of a specific production system, e.g., for a whole farm in terms of energy and cost requirements. This paper is the continuation of previous work, which presents a web-based tool for cost estimation of biomass production and transportation of multiple-crop production. In the present work, the tool is extended to additionally provide the energy balance of the examined systems. The energy input includes the whole supply chain of the biomass, namely crop cultivation, harvesting, handling of biomass and transportation to the processing facilities. A case study involving a real crop production system that feeds a biogas plant of 200 kW was selected for the demonstration of the tool’s applicability. The output of the tool provides a series of indexes dedicated to the energy input and balance. The presented tool can be used for the comparison of the performance, in terms of energy requirements, between various crops, fields, operations practices, and operations systems providing support for decisions on the biomass production system design (e.g., allocation of crops to fields) and operations management (e.g., machinery system selection).