Assessment of biodiesel energy sustainability using the exergy return on investment concept

Biofuels are part of the current energy mix and their contribution will increase in the years to come. However, policymakers and NGO have concerns regarding their sustainability. An adequate sustainability indicator is the energy return on investment (EROI), which evaluates the ratio of fossil energy consumption during their production. This paper applies the Exergy Cost Theory to different biodiesel production pathways, from crop cultivation to the production plant, in order to check if this principle is achieved using exergy instead of energy. For this purpose, it introduces a new sustainability indicator, called ExROI, defined as the ratio between the exergy of a particular resource and the amount of exergy required to obtain it. In other words, using exergy terms it tries to answer to the question: How much biodiesel would be needed to produce 1 kg of biodiesel? The paper demonstrates that the usual biodiesel production pathways are sustainable in this sense, although measures must be taken to decrease the rate of non-renewable energy consumption in the process, in order to make them economically competitive too.

► Biodiesel needs to be sustainable from a non-renewable resource perspective.
► The concept ExROI is used to check this premise.
► Biodiesel from rapeseed, sunflower and palm are analysed.
► These biodiesels are sustainable from a non-renewable resources point of view.
► ExROI is a good concept to analyse sustainability from a resources viewpoint.