Distribution and potential of bioenergy resources from agricultural activities in Mexico

Biomass is the most abundant and versatile form of renewable energy in the world. The bioenergy production from crop residues is compatible with both food and energy production. Currently, several technologies are available for transforming crop residues into utilizable energy such as direct combustion and fermentation. Mexico is the third largest country in LAC in terms of the cropland area and would become a central focus of attention for the production of biofuels. In this paper we examined the type, location and quantities of various crop residues in Mexico to evaluate their potential for conversion into bioenergy through combustion and fermentation. It was estimated that 75.73 million tons of dry matter was generated from 20 crops in Mexico. From this biomass, 60.13 million tons corresponds to primary crop residues mainly from corn straw, sorghum straw, tops/leaves of sugarcane and wheat straw. The generation of secondary crop residues accounted for 15.60 million tons to which sugarcane bagasse, corncobs, maguey bagasse and coffee pulp were the main contributors. The distribution of this biomass showed that several Mexican municipalities had very high by-product potentials where each municipality could have an installed capacity of 78 MW (via direct combustion) or 0.3 million m3 of bioethanol per year (via anaerobic fermentation). The identification of these municipalities where the biomass potential is high is important since it constitutes the first step towards evaluating the current biomass availability and accurately estimating the bioenergy production capacity from crop residues.