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Bagasse
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Bagasse (sometimes spelled bagass) is the biomass remaining after sugarcane stalks are crushed to extract their juice.
A sugar factory produces nearly 30% of bagasse out of its total crushing. Many research efforts have attempted to use bagasse as a renewable feedstock for power generation and for the production of bio-based materials.
Bagasse is often used as a primary fuel source for sugar mills; when burned in quantity, it produces sufficient heat energy to supply all the needs of a typical sugar mill, with energy to spare. To this end, a secondary use for this waste product is in cogeneration, the use of a fuel source to provide both heat energy, used in the mill, and electricity, which is typically on-sold to the consumer electricity grid.
The resulting CO2 emissions are equal to the amount of CO2 that the sugarcane plant used up from the atmosphere during its growing phase, which makes the process of cogeneration appear to be greenhouse gas-neutral. However when a full audit of energy used in production is done, 75% of the energy required to grow and move the sugar cane (including bagasse) is from liquid fuel (petroleum or hydrocarbon based), leading to a 25% net gain from photosynthesis.
Ethanol produced from the sugar in sugarcane is a popular fuel in Brazil. The cellulose rich bagasse is now being tested for production of commercial quantities of cellulosic ethanol.
Agave bagasse is a similar material which consists of the tissue of the blue agave after extraction of the sap.
- The Potential of Bagasse-Based Cogeneration in the US, Kevin Ho, Columbia University, 2006.