ISSN print edition: 0366-6352 ISSN electronic edition: 1336-9075 Registr. No.: MK SR 9/7 Published monthly

Environmental sustainability assessment of a biomass-based chemical industry in the Visegrad countries: Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia

Edit Cséfalvay, Tamás Hajas, and László T. Mika

Department of Energy Engineering, Faculty of Mechanical Engineering, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Budapest, Hungary

E-mail: csefalvay@mail.bme.hu

Received: 22 February 2020  Accepted: 24 April 2020

Abstract:

Three recently introduced ethanol equivalent-based sustainability metrics i.e., the sustainability value of resource replacement, the sustainability value of the fate of waste, and the sustainability indicator were used to assess the environmental sustainability of the possible bioethanol-based chemical industry in the Visegrad countries: Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia. The production of basic chemicals such as ethylene, propylene, toluene, xylenes, styrene, and benzene from bioethanol was evaluated. The theory is based on the utilization of cornstarch-based, first-generation bioethanol as a feedstock to produce bio-ethylene, which could be subsequently used as a starting material of well-established chemical technologies to synthesize the listed bulk chemicals. The analysis, which is a non-life-cycle assessment-based approach enlightened that although the switch of the chemical industry from crude oil to bioethanol would be theoretically feasible, the actual bioethanol production was far less than required to cover the raw material needs. Due to the high conversion and selectivity of the reactions studied, the sustainability value of the fate of the waste approached the sustainable value in case of ethylene production (i.e., 1), and the sustainability value of resource replacement acted as the limiting factor in sustainability indicator calculation. We showed a possibility to replace fossil-fuel resources with bioethanol, though the actual bioethanol volumes are not enough to cover the resource needs. Of the Visegrad countries, Slovakia shows the highest sustainability, but none of them can reach the minimum sustainable value of 0.5 up to now.

Keywords: Environmental sustainability index; Ethanol equivalent; Biomass-based chemical industry; Basic chemicals; Visegrad countries

Full paper is available at www.springerlink.com.

DOI: 10.1007/s11696-020-01172-8

Chemical Papers 74 (9) 3067–3076 (2020)