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Abstract
Amidst rising interest in biogas as a sustainable alternative to traditional energy vectors like natural gas, this study focuses on its role in achieving net-zero targets—where carbon emissions are balanced with sequestration. Biogas, derived from carbon-neutral organic waste, offers significant greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reductions. Life cycle assessments (LCA) are crucial for evaluating the global warming potential (GWP) of biogas, ensuring its effectiveness in offsetting fossil fuel equivalents. However, current GWP calculations lack transparency and standardization, necessitating new robust easily calculable algebraic equations. Our study introduces two complementary sets of equations, grounded in published literature and LCA databases. Despite their differing structures due to distinctive specific activities across life cycles, both sets yield closely aligned estimations, reinforcing confidence in these models. The GWP is sensitive to the feedstock type, electricity and heat consumption, and fugitive emissions. The statistical distributions show the mean GWP of 0.54 per m3 biogas, 0.09 per kWh biomethane and 0.73 per kWh electricity production rates of cradle-to-grave systems with all plausible technologies available in the database. The lowest GWP meets the UK’s 50 g CO2e per kWh biomethane target by 2030 for gas grid injection. The GWP in g CO2e per kg AD feedstock is 93-104 (manure), 16-26 (sludge), and 273 (grass silage), etc. The biowaste AD system reduces at 0.5-0.7 kg CO2e per kWh of electricity generated, requiring 1.5 MWh of minimum threshold electricity generation to reduce 1 tonne of CO2e.
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