engleski

Food as fuel: How to determine amount of biogenic component in liquid fuels

Crops can be used for food, feed, fiber or fuel. In order to reduce the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, one of the solution is to produce biofuels which can substitute fossil fuels and are in theory carbon neutral. The production of crops for biofuel competes with production for food at arable land. In order to work together with food production, the 2nd and 3rd generations of biofuels use crop residue after food farming, such as stems and lignocelluloses, and algae. There are subsidies for introduction of bio- component in fuels and thus the bio-component fraction should be accurately known. Measurement of the 14C activity of fuel is the best option to determine a fraction of the biogenic component, since the biogenic material contains 100 % of the natural 14C activity, while fossil material is practically free of 14C. Measurement of 14C activity is often expensive and time consuming. A direct measurement of the 14C activity in liquid fuel by liquid scintillation counter (LSC) is a simple and fast technique for determination of the bio-component fraction in the liquid fuel. The data evaluation technique developed at the radiocarbon Laboratory of the Ruđer Bošković Institute does not depend on the exact chemical composition of the liquid and gives reliable results for not-highly quenched samples. For highly quenched samples (dark colored) the accelerator mass spectrometry can be successfully used.

crop ; biofuel ; 14C ; liquid scintillation counting ; bio-component

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