Sustainability analysis of biodiesel production from Cynara Cardunculus crop

The presented work analyses the feasibility of biodiesel production by transesterification of vegetable oil extracted from Cynara Cardunculus. The performance assessment of a plant with a capacity of 5000 t/year biodiesel production is carried out based on its rigorous simulation in AspenHysys®. A modular automated evaluation tool programmed in Matlab® retrieves the inventory of the energy and material inputs/outputs, and the environmental releases from the simulation results. The simulation performs a combined acid-catalyzed pretreatment and alkali-catalyzed transesterification based on the cardoon oil characterization and the kinetic data extracted from published experimental studies. The performance of the plant is optimized considering four potential alternatives. The Eco-indicator 99 methodology is used for the impact assessment, achieving similar results to other vegetable sources of biodiesel. With respect to the economic study, a profitability analysis yields better results than the reported in previous works for oils of other agricultural crops, identifying two critical factors: the biodiesel sale price and the plant capacity.