Environmental profile of irrigated and non-irrigated soybean in central Argentina. Its application in bioenergy

PIASTRELLINI, R; ARENA, AP; CIVIT, B

Coatzacoalcos

Conferencia; IVth International Conference on Life Cycle Assessment; 2011

CADIS

The major soybean producing region as feedstock for biodiesel production in Argentina is the Pampas. However, in recent years the crop has spread to other regions of the country that have different climate, soil type and availability of water resources. In many of these regions is needed to enable irrigation systems to complement the crop water requirement. But in others, irrigation is used to increase the yield compared with soybean obtained in non-irrigated conditions. The purpose of this study is to compare the environmental profile obtained by analyzing the production cycle of soybean when applied artificial irrigation and when production is obtained from rainfed agriculture. The case study is located in the province of Córdoba in central Argentina. Production processes are considered for soybean ‘direct seeding’ in continuous tillage (SP-SD) because at the moment is the only planting system adopted in irrigated areas. The analysis accounted for the manufacture and transportation of chemicals and transport of RR soybean seeds, machinery manufacturing and delivery process of the diesel used as fuel. It is not considered the impact of the use of GMOs. Life Cycle Impact Assessment phase contemplate the impact categories included in the EDIP method / PICU 97 v2.04, using the software tool SimaPro V. 7.1. To them, the water use is added. The results allow us to infer that not only impact category Water Use varies between the two systems analyzed, but also categories such as Global Warming Potential, Energy Consumption and Toxicity show significant variation