Environmental Impact of Poultry Manure Gasification Technology for Energy and Ash Valorization

• Published in: Sustainability 2024-11, Vol.16 (22), p.9941
• Main Authors: Boakye-Yiadom, Kofi Armah, Ilari, Alessio, Bisinella, Valentina, Duca, Daniele
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Alternative energy sources; Ammonia; Biogas; Carbon dioxide; Climate change; Composting; Electricity; Emissions; Environmental aspects; Environmental performance; Fertilizers; Greenhouse gases; Heat; Heavy metals; Manures; Nitrates; Nitrogen; Phosphorus; Poultry; Resource recovery; Technology
• ISSN: 2071-1050; 2071-1050
• DOI: 10.3390/su16229941

Thermochemical technologies offer potential solutions for energy recovery and mitigating the environmental impacts of biomass waste. Poultry manure (PM), a nutrient-rich biomass but also a potentially problematic biomass waste, presents an opportunity for recovery and recycling. This study compares the environmental performance of a real-scale novel gasification technology called Chimera (designed and developed through an EU LIFE program) in locally treating PM with anaerobic digestion (AD) and incineration. Using life cycle assessment (LCA), the potential environmental impacts of the technologies were assessed using the Environmental Footprint (EF) 3.0 midpoint life cycle impact assessment method. We performed an attributional LCA with substitution. The selected functional unit (FU) is the treatment of one tonne (1000 kg) PM at 40% dry matter in the Netherlands in 2021 for 20 years. The LCA results of the three technologies compared showed that no single technology outperformed the other across all the impact categories. Climate change scores for the various technologies were −383 (incineration), −206 (Chimera), and −161 (anaerobic digestion) kg CO2 eq./FU. The results were influenced mainly by the potential utilization of the substituted heat and electricity. This study expands the existing literature on environmental sustainability assessments of PM treatment technologies. It underscores the prospects for these technologies to promote circularity while also indicating the bottlenecks for the potential environmental impacts and highlighting the most sensitive aspects that can influence the environmental performance of these technologies.