The possible contribution of agricultural crop residues to renewable energy targets in Europe: A spatially explicit study

This paper provides a geographical assessment of potential bioenergy production in the European Union from residues of eight agricultural crops (wheat,barley,rye,oat,maize,rice,rapeseed and sunflower).The evaluation is geographically explicit at the scale of1 km^2 and is based on two main computational steps.In the first step the amount of crop residues resulting from statistical assessment based on themethodology developed by Scarlat et al. [1] have been spatially allocated on the EU-27 territory using several auxiliary geospatial layers describing, for example,landcover,expected biomass productivity derived from soi lparameters,climatic zones and topographical conditions. In the second step the number of model power plants (i.e.,plants with a size of 50MW thermal input and a raw material demand of about 100kt/yr might be conveniently fed with available crop residues was estimated on the basis of two different allocation strategies implying a different grade of optimization. The results show that thee stimated crop residue resources in EU-27 could provide fuel for about 850 plants expected to produce about 1500PJ/yr. Mobilization needs for the residues are also estimated,leading to a total amount of 1.5*10^12–2*10^12 tkm anecessary for the full potential exploitation.

MONFORTI-FERRARIO Fabio;  BODIS Katalin;  SCARLAT Nicolae;  DALLEMAND Jean-Francois; 

2013-01-08

PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD

JRC67869

1364-0321,   

www.elsevier.com/locate/rser,    https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC67869,   

10.1016/j.rser.2012.11.060,