Avaliação do desemprenho ambiental da produção de biomassa florestal com finalidades energéticas no Brasil: caso de Itapeva

Abstract

There are several advantages of using forest biomass for energy generation. Brazil has soil and climate conditions that allow the achievement of high yields of forest plantations and, on that basis, the use of wood as biomass has significant participation in the national energy balance and also stands out in the international production scenario. In order to evaluate the environmental performance of this activity in Brazil through the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) technique, inventory data are required. Studies show that there are many variables related to forest management and these variations significantly influence the impact results, such as local climate, crop species, intended use of timber and the operations covered. This means that the regionalization of life cycle data is important. Therefore, a set of representative data of a Brazilian center of forests production with energy purposes in order to fill this gap in the LCA literature and databases. Methodological choices of similar literature studies based the dataset composition. The dataset was also adequate according to the ecoinvent database standards through adding it in EcoEditor. Besides, this work aimed to evaluate the environmental performance of the activity, for 1 m³ of wood, using the CML 2 method. Results of the AICV showed points that deserve attention in the forest management. They are the final transport operation, harvesting step, in particular the cutting operation and the extraction of wood and production of seedlings step. In the detailed analysis of each category, other critical points are found like the management phase emissions that contribute with more than 80% of the Global Warming potential, in particular the emissions of nitrous oxide. The comparison between the management of different countries allowed us to suggest possible variations in the management in Brazil which can bring benefits to their performance, being related to the harvest machinery, final transport load factor, organic fertilizers addition and the increase time cycle. These results will be tested in future studies. It was possible to conclude that the constructed dataset will be important for studies of LCA in Brazil since the product involved is part of several productive chains in the country. In addition, it was concluded that forest activity is indeed very diverse and that such diversities in fact influence the impact result. As the management in Brazil presented advantages with respect to other countries as less time of cultivation and greater annual productivity, studies that seek their improvement from the economic, environmental or social point of view are extremely important.