A Risk Assessment Study for Corn Farming to Biobutanol Production

Abstract

As a conclusion of growing global population and extensive fossil fuel consumption during the last century, the mass of greenhouse gases has been critically increased. Increasing greenhouse gas emissions and decreasing fossil fuel sources has been posed new challenges to agriculture, which is agricultural feedstock production. Because of the potential future effects of global climate change, people want to produce renewable fuel to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (GHG), but at the same time GHG emission increase because of feedstock production and fertilizer production. The purpose of this study is to investigate the life cycle energy and the potential risk of producing biobutanol from corn crop, which is one of the most used bio-crops all over the world. This study employs the use of the full life-cycle model GREET 2021 (Greenhouse gases, Regulated Emissions, and Energy use in Transportation) to obtain the emission data for the corn crop farming stage. According to the results, total nitrous oxide emissions are around 2.73 × 10−3 t N2O/t butanol per year from the corn farming. Also, the analysis of noncarcinogenic health risk of exposure to N2O from the United States Environmental Protection Agency standards shows that adults are at considerable non-carcinogenic risk and there is no serious adverse health effect for adults at corn farming per hectare.