Sugar Palm: A Novel Bio-Ethanol Feedstock

Abstract

The village hub is a small-scale factory, designed to support Indonesian rural communities in their development and to preserve local biodiversity. The main product of the village hub is sugar syrup based on the juice from the sugar palm tree. The village hub includes ethanol production. A life cycle assessment was performed to assess the environmental performance of ethanol production based on sugar palm juice. Additionally, an initial economic assessment was performed. Data was provided by the Masarang foundation, which developed the village hub, regarding sugar palm cultivation. This data was supplemented with measurements performed on key processes in the ethanol lifecycle as well as literature sources and the Ecoinvent database. The lifecycle assessment reveals that ethanol produced by the village hub has a poorer performance than fossil natural gas. However, this environmental performance can be improved to below natural gas levels by reducing the energy use in two key processes: juice processing and distillation. Sugar palm ethanol production has a good performance regarding climate impact and natural resource depletion while it performs poorer in the categories respiratory health and carcinogenic effects. When implementing ethanol production at a village hub, care needs to be taken to prevent additional environmental impacts caused by land use change resulting from an increase in juice production. It is likely that sugar palm ethanol will be expensive to produce compared to the retail price of natural gas. To lower the price of ethanol for the consumer, a subsidy will be required. The cost of juice has a large contribution to the overall production costs. When waste juice is used, the production costs are considerably decreased and a subsidy might not be required. Both the environmental as well as the economic performance of ethanol production is the best when waste juice is used. Using waste juice should be the preferred option for ethanol production.