The possible contribution of agricultural crop residues to renewable energy targets in Europe: A spatially explicit study

This paper provides a geographical assessment of potential bioenergy production in the European Union from residues of eight agricultural crops (wheat, barley, rye, oat, maize, rice, rapeseed and sunflower). The evaluation is geographically explicit at the scale of 1 km(2) and is based on two main computational steps. In the first step the amount of crop residues resulting from statistical assessment based on the methodology developed by Scarlat et al. [1] have been spatially allocated on the EU-27(1) territory using several auxiliary geospatial layers describing, for example, land cover, expected biomass productivity derived from soil parameters, climatic zones and topographical conditions. In the second step the number of model power plants (i.e., plants with a size of 50 MW thermal input and a raw material demand of about 100 kt/yr might be conveniently fed with available crop residues was estimated on the basis of two different allocation strategies implying a different grade of optimization. The results show that the estimated crop residue resources in EU-27 could provide fuel for about 850 plants expected to produce about 1500 PJ/yr. Mobilization needs for the residues are also estimated, leading to a total amount of 1.5 x 10(12)-2 x 10(12) tkm are necessary for the full potential exploitation. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.