Environmental impacts of a novel biorefinery platform integrated with power-to-protein technology to decrease dependencies on soybean imports.

The consistent population growth is directly tied to the annual rise in livestock production, placing a substantial burden on the crop sector that supplies animal feed. The Danish government has been relying on importing soybeans and soybean meal to be used as animal feed. However, this sparked environmental concerns that require more environmentally friendly solutions, such as self-sufficiency in animal feed production. The rise of green biorefineries allows new avenues of animal proteinaceous feed production using green biomass to produce leaf protein concentrate (LPC) and utilize side-stream products, such as brown juice and press cake, for feed-quality products. This study evaluated the combination of grass-clover biorefinery and the power-to-X concept, including power-to-protein technology, for its environmental sustainability through a consequential life cycle assessment (CLCA). The production of protein concentrate from organic grass clover exhibits optimal environmental performance when press cake and brown juice are used for bioenergy recovery. The findings indicate that combining a green biorefinery with power-to-protein to fully valorize the carbon and nitrogen content of brown juice and press cake into feed-grade protein can increase the environmental benefits. Such an integration resulted in an avoided impact of -995.9 kg CO2-eq/tonne of protein concentrate. The avoided impacts of climate change could be higher within the first 20 years due to a higher carbon sequestration rate. However, even after 20 years when a new carbon balance in the soil is reached, the environmental gain could be big enough to encourage the production and use of organic grass-clover protein concentrate.

Influence of the reaction conditions on the enzyme catalyzed transesterification of castor oil: A possible step in biodiesel production.

The identification of the influence of the reaction parameters is of paramount importance when defining a process design. In this work, non-edible castor oil was reacted with methanol to produce a possible component for biodiesel blends, using liquid enzymes as the catalyst. Temperature, alcohol-to-oil molar ratio, enzyme and added water contents were the reaction parameters evaluated in the transesterification reactions. The optimal conditions, giving the optimal final FAME yield and FFA content in the methyl ester-phase was identified. At 35°C, 6.0 methanol-to-oil molar ratio, 5wt% of enzyme and 5wt% of water contents, 94% of FAME yield and 6.1% of FFA in the final composition were obtained. The investigation was completed with the analysis of the component profiles, showing that at least 8h are necessary to reach a satisfactory FAME yield together with a minor FFA content.