Biogas and biofertilizer from vinasse: making sugarcane ethanol even more sustainable
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Biogas and biofertilizer from vinasse: making sugarcane ethanol even more sustainable Pietro Sica1 · Renan Carvalho1 · K. C. Das2 · Antonio Sampaio Baptista1 Received: 7 December 2019 / Accepted: 27 March 2020 © Springer Japan KK, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Brazil is the first producer of sugarcane ethanol, considered a green and renewable biofuel. However, for each liter of ethanol, 10–15 L of vinasse—liquid rich in organic matter and minerals—are generated. For this reason, this project aimed to assess the anaerobic digestion performance in a 4.5 L UASB reactor fed with vinasse containing 30 g L −1 and 41.2 g L −1 of chemical oxygen demand (COD). Increasing the COD concentration increased the liters of methane produced per grams of COD reduced from 0.19 to 0.25 and did not reduc e the macronutrients concentration of the effluent, that can be used as biofertilizer. Based on this experiment results for 30 g of COD L −1, a study case was conducted considering an average ethanol plant in the state of Sao Paulo, that produces 192 million liters of ethanol and 2.4 billion liters of vinasse per harvest season. Anaerobic digestion can increase the energy generation of this plant by 6%, avoiding 57,600 tons of COD to be applied in the field, and providing an effluent with enough potassium to fertilize more than 30,000 ha of sugarcane fields. Therefore, biogas and biofertilizer from vinasse can make the sugarcane ethanol greener. Keywords Biogas · Biofertilizer · Biofuels · Greener ethanol · RenovaBio
Introduction Sugarcane plays an important role in Brazilian history since in the early days of the colonized country, the Portuguese began to cultivate it. Since then, it has become one of the most relevant crops of the Brazilian economy. Sugar production was boosted during the Sugar Cycle between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries [1]. In recent decades, with Pro-Alcool (1975) policies [2] and, later, the introduction of flex cars in Brazil (2003), ethanol has been increasingly highlighted among renewable energy sources [3], and in 2016, sugarcane products represented 17.2% of the primary energy production in Brazil [4]. Thus, over the years, the colonial sugar industry has become the sugar–alcohol industry, which is now called sucroenergetic sector. The * Pietro Sica [email protected] 1
Department of Agri‑Food Industry, Food and Nutrition, College of Agriculture “Luiz de Queiroz”, University of Sao Paulo, 11 Padua Dias Avenue, Piracicaba, SP 13418‑900, Brazil
College of Engineering, University of Georgia, 110 Riverbend Road, Athens, GA 30602, USA
2
transformation of sugarcane production was also geographically from the Northeast [1] to the Central South, where about 90% of the total sugarcane and ethanol production is currently concentrated, almost half in the state of São Paulo [5]. The sugarcane industry processes huge amounts of raw material and, consequently, large volumes of by-products are generated. For this reason, this industry developed by dimensioning the re
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