Life Cycle Assessment of biogas upgrading routes

The upgrading of biogas to biomethane, by removing contaminants and carbon dioxide, is a treatment that allows this gaseous fuel to reach the specifications suitable for the injection in the natural gas grid and the use as vehicle fuel. This pathway enables the conversion of wet biomass into a perfect substitute of natural gas. Biogas upgrading is usually performed through CO2 removal and the most diffused method is water scrubbing. However, the embedded CO2 could be directly recycled into methane through a high-temperature co-electrolysis process followed by a methanation step, thus increasing the yield of biomethane for the same biogas inlet. In this paper the environmental impacts of two routes for biomethane production are compared in the framework of the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology. A sensitivity analysis for different shares of renewable content in electricity has been carried out. The results show that the large need for electrical energy penalizes the electrolytic process for renewable contents of the electricity which are not close to 100%. (C) 2019 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.