Water Footprint of an Ethanol Product in Mae Sot District, Tak Province, Thailand

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1 Available online at ST-O-023 Burapha University International Conference 2015 Moving Forward to a Prosperous and Sustainable Community Water Footprint of an Ethanol Product in Mae Sot District, Tak Province, Thailand Tanyawan Krissanawan a, Chitchol Phalarakse b * a Environmental Science Program, Faculty of Science, Chiang Mai University, Chiang Mai 50200, Thailand b Environmental Science Program, Faculty of Science, Chiang Mai University, Chiang Mai 50200, Thailand Abstract Water scarcity represents one of the main factors to life of earth. Over last 10 years, Almost of society and business has been realized about importance of this issue and also increasing concern about long-term sustainability of water. The water footprint is one of tool which use for indicating efficiency of freshwater usage and revealing hidden water of each product. This research data was collected from bioethanol factory in Tak province, Thailand during the year Calculating Water Footprint was divided in to 2 sections which are crop cultivation water footprint and production process. This study mentioned in production process and resulting indicated that green water footprint was zero because their production process did not use input water from precipitation and water body was flow in closed system, therefore there was no evaporation happened during this stage. The blue water footprint was 0.62 l/l and grey water footprint was l/l. In our research, we did not calculate crop cultivation water footprint but it was from related research. Consequently, The total water footprint of bioethanol was l/l which different from previous studies Published by Burapha University. Keyword: Water footprint; bioethanol; Mae Sot; Virtual water; Blue water footprint; Grey water footprint * Corresponding author. Tel.: address: tkrissanawan@nis.ac.th. 639

2 1. Introduction Proceedings of the Burapha University International Conference 2015, July 2015, Bangsaen, Chonburi, Thailand Water shortage has been one of the most popular issue in last 5 years ago. It causes from population growth rapidly and becomes increasing continually. Nowadays almost of society and business have brought this issue to consider and figure out solutions. One of the tool which uses to assist water management is water footprint. The water footprint concept was presented by Professor Hoerkstra of Twente university. This tool can indicate water usages in each target product, in terms of presenting the importance of water consumption pattern and global dimension in good water management. It is an indicator of direct and indirect water usages which means hidden water use of the product. There are 3 components of water footprint concept which are Green water footprint (WFgreen), Blue water footprint (WFblue) and Grey water footprint (WFgrey). The green WF refers to rainwater that evaporates during crop growth. The blue WF refers to surface and ground water in the catchment area that consume along the supply chain by processing and evaporation volume of surface or groundwater. The grey WF is the volume of water polluted as a volume of freshwater that is required to dilute pollutants based on ambient water quality standards. Therefore, the calculation of water footprint needs to use 3 components. Thailand is the 4 th rank of sugarcane production country of the world especially in Tak province. There is a factory where uses sugarcane as the reactant of bioethanol and also supports sugarcane cultivation to local people for sending products to the factory. However, the water lacking problem of Thailand is not acute as Africa but we have high rate of sugarcane production and increasing number continually. Many countries such as European countries and America are going to use biofuel instead of benzene causing demand of renewable energy and also reactant plant cultivation affects the water shortage issue. The food and agriculture organization (FAO) reported that there was 75 million people in 2007 faced this issue. Moreover, FAO reported that the trend of food value was getting more expensive which caused by the increasing of biofuel production that made food economics seemed worse. Thus, using biofuel instead of petroleum has to consider the water volume in production process of renewable energy by calculating from demand of water in production process and report in form of water footprint which able to reveal amount of using water annually. Therefore, the water footprint of bioethanol product consists of 2 part which are crop cultivation and production process. The crop cultivation water footprint was collected data from the study site directly which could make water footprint more clearly and accuracy, and provide a good representative the water footprint of that area. In addition, the water footprint of production process was studied from Mae Sot Clean energy factory. Therefore, this study aims to calculate the water footprint of sugarcane production in Mae Sot District using local character data and to make the water usage situation clearer. 2. Methodology The water footprint of bioethanol consists of 2 sessions. Firstly, crop cultivation water footprint was referred from (Sareein, 2014) and this study aims to calculate water footprint of production process that leads to the water footprint of bioethanol product 2.1 Study site investigation Since the production process session is quite complicating system which consists of many types of machine. Therefore, I surveyed study area before doing research to find inputting water point and outputting by did interview from engineers and studied from production plan of the bioethanol production process 2.2 Bioethanol production process Refers to figure 1 the bioethanol production process consists of 5 step of production process. Firstly, is the pre-treatment method which for preparing reactant for production process. Before adding all of 640

3 sugarcane to production there is no washing method. Therefore, there s no water added to this process. Secondly, dilution process which all of sugarcane juice was diluted by water into required concentration. After that is fermentation process which converts sugar in sugarcane to alcohol by using yeast as catalyst. Then is Distillation which purify bioethanol to 95% v/v. Finally, dehydration process which makes bioethanol has 5% of water as combination. 1.2 Green water footprint Green water footprint is amount of water from precipitation during Process but bioethanol production process is closed system which means the water would always flow in the system. Nevertheless, precipitating water does not affect this green water footprint of this part. Thus, green water footprint of production process is zero 1.3 Blue water footprint Blue water footprint is an amount of adding water since the beginning of the process including amount of water which added to system during production process. This factory uses water from raw water pond which belongs to the plant Figure 1: Defining blue and grey water footprint 1.3 Grey water footprint Grey water footprint is an amount of water which needs to dilute wastewater which got from production process into ambient standard (m3/ton) (Figure 1) 3. Results and discussion 641

4 Firstly, quantity of sugarcane as reactant product proportion was studied, resulting in 5,000 ton of sugarcane were sent to the factory per day and from the studying I found that there is 680 kg of molasses would get form 1 ton of sugarcane that means this factory can produce 3,400,000 kg of molasses per day and they would keep this product and uses as bioethanol reactant when the sugarcane cultivation season is over. In addition, this bioethanol productive capacity of Mae Sot Clean Energy is 200,000 liters per day. Water footprint calculation of production process consists of WFgreen, WFblue and also WFgrey which divided into 2 sessions which are water footprint of molasses production and bioethanol production process of whole system Green and Blue water footprint of molasses production were calculated by this equation below [1] The fp [p,i] referred from Thailand Environment Institute Foundation (2009) and fv[p] of molasses production was referred from Scholten (2009) In this part, green water footprint of production process ) was zero because there was no crop cultivation factor affected this process. When finished calculation, resulting in green water footprint of molasses was (m 3 /ton) Blue water footprint of molasses production was calculated by water from irrigation of water source which reserved for production process. From the studying was found that there was 170 m 3 were added to the production process per hour or around 4,080 m 3 per day. The blue water footprint was calculated by this following equation. [2] The sugarcane cultivation of Mae Sot district has used water from precipitation only and there was no irrigation for cultivation. Therefore, the blue water footprint ( ) was zero and molasses production used 4,080 m 3 of water on the average per day to produce molasses from 1 ton of sugarcane, resulting blue water footprint of molasses in 0.07 m 3 /ton. Grey water footprint calculated by using COD (Chemical Oxygen Demand) as parameter. There are 7 wastewater treatment ponds which belong to this plant and The COD of 7 th pond was chosen because it is the last pond that releases water to natural resource and calculated by equation (3) resulting in l/l (product) as grey water footprint of ethanol production process. This value was a grey water footprint of production process which didn t get from molasses production. [3] Table 1 : Shows The water footprint values of crop cultivation and production process Type of Water footprint L/L (Ethanol) Green Water Footprint Blue Water Footprint 0.62 Grey Water Footprint

5 Total Water Footprint Finally, all of water footprint parameters of crop cultivation and production process were collected. To calculate the water footprint of ethanol production we should combine these two values and resulting in l(water)/l(ethanol) Figure 2: Shows the water footprint calculation of each countries (Scholten, 2009) Compared the water footprint from this research which was l/l(ethanol) to Scholten (2009) which studied the water footprint of ethanol production by sugarcane as reactant from many countries. Especially the water footprint of Thailand (Figure 2) was 3,200 l/l(ethanol) reveals the big different values because there was no irrigation water in this study site which made blue water footprint of Mae Sot area was different, resulting in the minimum water footprint the others. The green water footprint of Scholten (2008) calculated from average precipitation of the country but this research data was collected from virtual precipitation around study site. 4. Conclusion The water footprint of Bioethanol production in Mae Sot Districk, Tak Province, Thailand for the period was calculated as l/l(ethanol). The result was the smallest compared with other case studies. Various factors lead to the difference of amount of water usages as the water footprint. The water footprint may become bigger or less than real one when calculated using average or secondary data. 643

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