Increasing demand for energy, growing scarcity of fossil fuel and environmental concern have stimulated the policy makers in US and Europe to search for alternative sources of energy; the agricultural sector can be a viable solution to this problem. The analysis is addressed to study the agro-industrial chains to produce biofuels including farms and industrial plants, as though it were an "island economy" working as a net energy exporter as the energy output exceed the direct and indirect energy inputs and the value chains of the biofuel and glycerine with other products obtained by recycling meal increases consistently. The analysis will afford the economic, energetic and ecological aspects of the energy cogeneration and intends to demonstrate sustainability of this approach. The renewable energy is generated with sunflower oil production transformed into biodiesel, while the co-product sunflower meal and/or cake are used in the dairy production, the wastes are used to produce biogas to generate electricity and heat and the final residual compost is used for fertilization. This integrated farm energy cogeneration project (IFECO) requires to analyze the different steps of the agro-industrial chain, to afford investments and operating costs in managing integrated energetic plants. The convenience to operate the IFECO will depend on the ability to afford technological and logistic problems as well to manage the many activities performed at different chain steps: cultivation, processing, storage and transport, achieving scale and scope economies in the same agro-industrial complex.
The results from IFECO support the validity of the project: the total energy produced with sunflower chain is significantly superior to the energy spent, the economic gain is reflected in a considerable increase of the annual income and value of land from capitalization of permanent net cash flow; finally the life cycle GHG savings from displacing the fossil fuel (reduction in CO, VOC, PM10, SOx, Nox) is a valuable contribution to improve the ecological condition of the biosphere and is a market value for the application of the carbon credit tax of Kyoto Protocol.
