A new approach for selecting the most suitable oilseed for biodiesel production; the integrated AHP-TOPSIS method

Abstract

The rapid growth of the world's population and industrial revolution has led to an increase in the need for energy. However, the scarcity of fossil fuels and serious environmental pollution problems have attracted researchers on developing alternative or renewable energy sources. Among these energy sources, biodie-sel has been the most popular energy source for decades. Energy crops that are cultivated as oil feedstock such as soybean, cottonseed, rapeseed, and camelina for biodiesel production in Turkey. Due to different physicochemical properties of these oilseeds, fuel quality, engine performance characteristics and emis-sion results of biodiesel are the significant criteria that have been changing. Therefore, these criteria were evaluated by using multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) techniques for the selection of the most suit-able energy crop. For this purpose, AHP has been applied for evaluating the significance of each criterion and ranks of investigated alternatives have been calculated by using TOPSIS. The results identified rape-seed as the most suitable oilseed as an energy crop for cultivation in Turkey whereas cottonseed was an unsuitable choice for biodiesel production. This integrated analysis method here can be utilized by pol-icymakers as a pre-investment tool in developing new business models for the goal of reducing exhaust emissions as well as decreasing dependence on fossil fuels.