Resumo:
The objective of the present work was to perform a comparative sustainability
assessment of jet biofuel production in Brazil by hydrotreatment of palm and soybean oil,
with the aim to contribute with the development of the jet biofuel production chain in the
country. The Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology was chosen to perform the analysis
from raw materials production until final use, which is known as Well-to-Wake (WtWa)
analysis. The functional unit selected was 1,0 MJ of energy produced. The software utilized to
calculate the environmental impacts was Simapro v.8.0.3 and the impact assessment method
chosen was the IMPACT 2002+ method. A hybrid LCA approach was proposed, being a
combination of the attributional and consequential methods, where both displacement and
energy allocation were used for handling co-products in the oil extraction and hydrotreatment
phase, respectively. However, an alternative assessment scenario was included in order to
examine the effect of co-product allocation on impacts calculation. Results showed reductions
and improvements in relation to fossil jet in 10 of 15 midpoint categories, as well as in 3 of 4
damage categories analyzed and in that sense, the aviation biofuel from palm oil was the one
with the best environmental performance. Cultivation and hydrotreatment stages in both
scenarios were the biggest contributors in most of the categories analyzed, due to emissions
derived from usage of petrochemical products, agro-toxics and fuels during agricultural
operations, as well as the emissions derived from production and use of hydrogen and steam
in hydrotreatment. Co-product allocation had a great influence on results and in this regard, it
was noted that the hybrid method yielded lower results than the energy allocation approach.
Results of energy efficiency were of 5,58 and 4,25 for aviation biofuel from palm and
soybean oil, respectively, demonstrating the renewability of both of them. It was concluded
that the two aviation biofuel scenarios proposed have a great potential for the establishment of
a sustainable production chain in the country.
