Evaluation of environmental impacts and GHG of palm polyol production using life cycle assessment approach

By: Zolkarnain, N.; Yusoff, S.; Subramaniam, V.; Maurad, Z.A.; Bakar, Z.A.; Ghazali, R. and Hassan, H.A.

Journal of Oil Palm Research --- Year 2015; Volume 27; Issue 2 ; Page 144-155

Keywords: bio-based polyol, greenhouse gasses, LCA, life cycle impact assessment, palm oil

Abstract

Presently, very few life cycle assess­ment (LCA) stud­ies have been con­ducted and reported on the pro­duc­tion of palm polyol. Pre­vi­ously, most of the LCA stud­ies on the polyol pro­duc­tion are lim­ited to petro­leum, soya or cas­tor polyol. In this study, a LCA of a palm polyol was per­formed. The objec­tive of this study is to iden­tify any poten­tial envi­ron­men­tal impacts that could be asso­ci­ated with the pro­duc­tion of palm polyol. The cradle-to-gate sys­tem bound­ary for the pro­duc­tion of palm polyol shows that the most sig­nif­i­cant impact from the palm polyol pro­duc­tion comes from the energy use at the polyol plant. This impact is mainly con­tributed by elec­tric­ity, and pro­duc­tion of hydro­gen per­ox­ide and formic acid that were used dur­ing the epox­i­da­tion process. The largest green­house gasses (GHG) con­tri­bu­tion was from con­sump­tion of elec­tric­ity from the national grid that was mainly used for pilot plant polyol process. How­ever, from this study, about 29% reduc­tion in the GHG emis­sions gen­er­ated by the pro­duc­tion of palm polyol could be achieved by using the best approach nor­mally used in oil palm indus­try which is using con­tin­ued land use and bio­gas cap­ture scenario.