Abstract
Biorefinery concept is currently applied to increase the process sustainability and resources conservation, however, in not all cases the use of process residues for obtaining high value products yields in a topology with lower environmental impacts. For this reason, it is necessary to know the environmental performance of novel biorefinery topologies. In this work, a topology of palm-based biorefinery was developed for the production of crude palm oil, bio-hydrogen and palm kernel oil under North-Colombian conditions. Environmental assessment was performed using software WARGUI, which use Waste Reduction Algorithm, in order to quantify the total generated and output environmental impacts for the biorefinery for 4 different case studies taking into account energy source and products under 8 categories. Results shows that, in general terms, the process is environmentally beneficial. The total generated PEI is negative and 10-1 order. Moreover, the palm-based biorefinery has a high environmental sensitivity to energy source derived of energy requirements in hydrogen production unit, so that if the energy improvements in the process are carried out by changing the type of fuel, values for PEI output for atmospheric environmental impacts categories could be reduced considerably.
