Abstract
In China, the non-exploitation of bioenergy poses major problems and challenges. To solve bioenergy problems, considerable efforts have been made to expedite the construction of large-scale crop residue utilization projects. In this study, three principal supported modes of large-scale crop residue utilization projects were taken as empirical cases in Hubei province bioenergy planning. In terms of the overall benefit and sustainable development, a third-grade evaluation index system was established. The analysis was carried out using the analytical hierarchy process, principal component projection, and grey relational analysis. The conclusion indicates that according to the evaluation values, the sequence from best to worst was crop residue biogas project, crop residue briquette fuel project, and crop residue gasification project. Nevertheless, there was no remarkable difference in the overall evaluation values. The biogas project had certain advantages in terms of the production cost, soil improvement, and expenditure saving, whereas the gasification project was comparatively insufficient in environmental efficiency, product benefit, by-product disposal, and technical rationality. According to actual evaluation results, the unilateral determination approach of the single weight index can be seen as being overcome through the unified adaptation of the evaluation methods. The research results can serve as a reference for making investment decisions to build large-scale crop residue utilization projects.
Highlights
Despite the rapid development of Chinese energy production, there are energy shortage problems that need innovative solutions
Ji [5] used an artificial neural network (ANN) model to estimate the annual production of crop residue, where the results showed that about 930 Mt was produced annually
According to the value of the evaluation vector, we found that the biogas project of crop residue (CR) had several advantages, for example, the product cost, expenditure saving, and soil improvement
Summary
Despite the rapid development of Chinese energy production, there are energy shortage problems (especially bioenergy problems) that need innovative solutions. Chinese rural and developed areas have limited use of bioenergy, which consumes crop residue (CR) and agricultural wastes in biogas production projects [6]. CR biogas, gasification, and briquette projects (including solidification and carbonization) were proposed in the bioenergy medium- and long-term development plan in Hubei province. These proposed projects referred to a new technology that should be significantly accelerated to enhance the utilized quantity of CR [19,20]. The evaluation results can provide a reference for the investment decision of large-scale CR utilization projects
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