ABSTRACT
This chapter summarizes the main applications of agricultural residues as fuel and investigates the environmental risks involved. The term 'agricultural residues' covers a broad spectrum of biomass materials produced as a by-product of agriculture and agricultural processing. Agricultural residues already play a variety of roles as an energy source. The environmental impacts of using agricultural residues as fuel can be divided into two main groups. The first relates to their combustion and end use as fuel; the second, to be considered in the next section, relates to environmental 'opportunity cost'. The environmental implications of using agricultural residues as fuel is clearly very site specific. Although agricultural residues have valuable functions as organic fertilizers, they cannot all be used for this purpose. The position is clearly very different in cases where agricultural residues are being diverted from fertilizer uses. Agricultural residues are the main source of organic matter in the soil in most farming systems.
