Ethanol from broken grains will contribute to India’s fuel mix, therefore, the environmental impacts must be systematically quantified. This work performs a detailed life cycle assessment (LCA) of ethanol production from broken wheat and rice in the Indian context. Cradle-to-gate system boundary is considered, and the functional unit is 1 L ethanol. Process inventory is based on literature studies and basic process engineering calculations. Ecoinvent® v3.3 database is also used to get required inventory data. OpenLCA 1.11.0 software and the ReCiPe midpoint (H) model are used for the calculations. A key conclusion is that ethanol from broken grains has substantially lower global warming potential (GWP) (0.536–0.983 kg CO2 eq.) as compared to other fuels. Ethanol from rice has higher GWP and water depletion than that from wheat. The results also show the impacts are dominated by the farming stage. About 98% of water depletion was due to the agricultural stage for both grains. The other import impact factors are fossil depletion, human toxicity, metal depletion, marine eutrophication, and terrestrial acidification. The main driving factors for these are the depletion of coal, natural gas, and crude oil and by the emissions in the form of methane, mercury, manganese, and other metals.
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