Web-Based Tool Approach for Energy Balance Estimation Designed for Multiple-Crops Production Systems

Abstract

Biomass production systems include a number of spread fields located in a range of distances between the storage or processing facilities, multiple-crops rotations, different operational practices and various machinery systems. These aspects differentiate the cost and the energy requirements of the system. For these reasons, assessment tools based on average norms cannot provide an accurate evaluation of a specific production system in terms of cost and energy requirements. This paper is the continuation of a previous work where a web-based tool was presented for the estimation of the cost for the biomass production and transportation of multiple-crop production. In this work, the tool is extended in order to provide in addition the energy balance of the studied systems. The energy input accounting regards the whole supply chain of the biomass, including the crop cultivation, the harvesting and the handling of biomass including the transportation to the processing facilities. The inclusion of operational and agronomic parameters provides an accurate estimation of the energy requirements for a specific system allowing to calculate in detail specific energy inputs/outputs.