Utilization of olive pomace for energy purposes in Tuscany: a spatially explicit approach applied to estimating potentials of local bioenergy chains

In Tuscany, approximately 83,000 t/year of crude olive cake are produced as a by-product of the olive oil industry. Part of this by-product is currently conveyed from 450 olive mills to two olive-pomace oil extraction plants where crude pomace oil is produced and dried pomace is used as biomass fuel. In the present work, the energy potential of the crude olive cake produced in Tuscany is assessed and made geographically explicit. Due to differences in the milling processes currently used in Tuscany, olive pomace characteristics vary in terms of moisture content and LHV, which are parameters that can largely influence the quality of biomass. Differences in quality of the biomass obtained through each crushing process were defined and energy potential was allocated to each of the ca 450 georeferenced olive mills, considering local olive production, crushing capacity and type of milling process in order to estimate local bioenergy potentials.
Proceedings of the 18th European Biomass Conference and Exhibition, 3-7 May 2010, Lyon, France, pp. 337-339