Session: Energy

LCA of imported agricultural products – impacts due to deforestation and burning of residues
Niels Jungbluth,^* ESU-services Ltd.

Life cycle assessment (LCA) of imported oil plants life soybeans or plant oils, e.g. palm oil, is an important issue in many LCA studies for food products and animal production. Quite often imported products are assessed with the same data as national products. Country specific aspects for the location of production might thus be forgotten.

In an ecoinvent project for the investigation of biofuels several such agricultural products have been investigated. The aim of this project is to investigate data for biomass production, conversion to biofuels and use for transport services. The production of fuels like ethanol, rape seed methyl ether, BTL (biomass-to-liquid), etc. is investigated in a way consistent with the existing ecoinvent datasets. The findings from this project are quite interesting also for studies on food products. The presentation highlights methodological issues relevant for global biofuel production, like accounting for CO2 emissions due to land transformation and clear cutting of tropical rain forests. Results from the LCA study for soybeans and oil produced in Brazil and the US, sugar produced in Brazil as well as for palm oil production in Malaysia is presented. The assessment shows that CO2 and particle emissions due to deforestation and burning of harvesting residues might form an important part of environmental impacts throughout the life cycle. Especially the issue of deforestation should be taken into account for countries with increasing agricultural production area.

---