A GIS based approach for locating suitable sites for cassava plantation and biofuel industry | |
| Author | Naruemon Phongaksorn |
| Call Number | AIT Thesis no.RS-07-6 |
| Subject(s) | Geographic information systems Cassava Biomass energy |
| Note | A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Remote Sensing and Geographic Information Systems |
| Publisher | Asian Institute of Technology |
| Abstract | Thailand has confronted with the oil price crisis like other parts in the world. The government has accordingly devised energy strategies to solve the mentioned problem. One of these strategies is the development of bio-fuels such as ethanol with an objective to reduce the national energy import bill, increasing the proportion of renewable energy use and can be a solution for a fluctuation of cassava cost. At present, the current plants cannot produce ethanol enough to meet the requirements. To solve the mentioned problem, the government has accordingly devised ethanol industry liberalization by promoting individuals for ethanol industry construction, production and distribution. In this regard, the study offers to locate suitable sites for cassava plantation and biofuel industry. This research focuses on cassava as it is can be cultivated on lands where other crops have low yields, it is easy to cultivate, needs little water as it is highly drought resistant, requires little care, has few pests, has high productivity, and popular crop among farmers. Sa Kaeo province has been chosen as the study area as there is a lot of cassava cultivation in this area. The objective of this study is (i) to develop probable criteria of suitable sites for cassava plantation and ethanol industry locations, and (ii) to develop a multi-criteria based spatial decision support approach for land evaluations for suitable sites for biofuel plantation and industrial locations. Methodology of this research is divided to main two phases: to evaluate suitable sites for cassava plantation and biofuel industrial. To evaluate suitable sites for cassava plantation mainly based on FAO framework 1983 and Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) for weighting factor. The selected diagnostic factors include annual rainfall, soil drainage, Nutrient Availability Index (NAI), soil texture, soil depth, and slope. To evaluate suitable sites for biofuel industrial was relatively minimizing environmental impact and maximize economic benefits. To minimize environmental impact, the constraints criteria are adopted. To maximize economic benefits, the most important criteria are the distances of various buffer zones, which define the minimum distances of development sites to those selected geographic entities/features. Then five factors were identified to address the preference of selecting a potential site to maximize economic benefits. These factors are: distance between potential site and roads, villages, raw materials, power lines, and resource of water. The result shows that the highly and moderately suitable areas for cassava there are a total area of 5,910.36 square kilometer, which the total of ethanol capacity in Sa Kaeo province is 1,959.04 million liter/day. The highly suitable areas for biofuel industry have a total area of 1,484.74 square kilometer square kilometer, which also can provide enough land to develop ethanol industry in Sa Kaeo province. |
| Year | 2007 |
| Type | Thesis |
| School | School of Engineering and Technology (SET) |
| Department | Department of Information and Communications Technologies (DICT) |
| Academic Program/FoS | Remote Sensing (RS) |
| Chairperson(s) | Tripathi, Nitin K; |
| Examination Committee(s) | Kibe, Seishiro;Jayasuriya, Hemantha; |
| Scholarship Donor(s) | Agricultural Research Development Agency (Public Organization), Thailand |
| Degree | Thesis (M.Sc.) - Asian Institute of Technology, 2007 |