Sistema produtivo do café brasileiro destinado à exportação: uma avaliação ambiental e econômica do aproveitamento energético do resíduo de beneficiamento

Abstract

Considering the climate changes in the current world scenario, due to the increase in global temperature, added to the need for a social balance in the use of electricity, reducing the number of citizens without access to electricity, one of the solutions is the significant and growing use of renewable sources. As Brazil is a country of agricultural culture, alternatives that make use of agro industrial residues are important. For over a hundred years, Brazil has been the world's largest producer of coffee and, therefore, the use of its residues is necessary. An environmental study was carried out through the evaluation of the life cycle of the coffee production system in the municipality of Santa Rosa da Serra (MG), until its export. The study was divided into three scenarios, scenario 1, the base scenario, in which the bark is discarded outdoors; scenario 2, with the use of this bark as organic fertilizer and scenario 3, with the energy use of the bark for gasification, generating energy that is later used in the motor-generator group and all in its manual and mechanized varieties. The inventories were prepared for the existing scenarios and the environmental impacts of this production cycle with the use of this residue was investigated. The amount of energy and power produced with the coffee husk (available energy), for the Brazilian states in general, resulted in a total of 54,333.9 kW of power. An economic and technical analysis was carried out for the use of coffee husks for gasification, considering the 5 municipalities that are the largest coffee producers in the State of Minas Gerais. Sponsorship is the municipality with the highest available power of 1,040.2 kW. From the economic analysis, it was verified that among the five municipalities evaluated (in energy production), only the municipality of Patrocínio presented a positive NPV. The LCOE shows that projects using the technology of gasification with the coffee husk, although it is technically viable, according to the economic analysis, it become unfeasible. In the environmental study, the climate change category was the most affected both in case of study 1 (manual and mechanized) and in case of study 3 (manual and mechanized), however, strongly for mechanized case study 1, which can be explained because this management uses more machinery and a greater quantity of inputs for each ton of coffee produced.