Burkina Faso's agricultural and industrial sectors are sources of biomass production which are not well tapped. However, the exact quantities available and mobilizable with connection to recovery technologies are not available in the literature. Also, there is very little data on the criteria for the optimal selection of the biomasses to be valorized. In this article, quantification of the main biomasses produced in Burkina Faso has been carried out. Additionally, sustainable biomass selection criteria have been established. A hybrid (AHP-TOPSIS) multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) approach was used to prioritize suitable biomass resources based on defined criteria for bioenergy production. Based on expert opinions and an in-depth review of the literature, six main biomass selection criteria were established: i) biomass availability and accessibility, ii) competitive uses, iii) pollution potential related to residue accumulation, iv) economic impact, v) biomass energy content, and vi) availability of appropriate biomass conversion technologies. Moreover, five potential biomasses were investigated, including cotton stalks, rice husks, cashew nutshells, mango peels, and mango pits. The results of the evaluation showed that cotton stalks were the best option.

Considering the great environmental awakenings at the planetary level and the discounted growth of the carriage of goods per transportation mode in the world, the distribution and haulage companies must start to take measures to limit their impacts. The goal of this paper is to model the performance of an intermodal transportation system within the green supply chain, taking into account the economic, environmental and societal criteria in order to help decision-makers in choosing the path with the best compromised benefit/impacts in an intermodal transportation system. We have to trade with many conflicting criteria, it is thus appropriate to use multicriteria decision support system to find the best compromised solution. The path selection in a multimodal transportation network is therefore a multicriteria decision-making problem. In this paper, we will use an approach based on the elimination and choice expressing the reality (ELECTRE) method to solve our multicriteria model.

The industrial sector in Burkina Faso faces two significant energy challenges access to efficient energy sources that are also renewable. Pyrolysis and gasification are emerging as conversion pathways that exploit available agricultural and industrial biomass. Pyrolysis has been adopted successfully, whereas gasification failed without getting beyond the experimental stage. This article assesses potential barriers to the adoption of gasification based on interviews with the stakeholders of the energy sector (users, NGOs, policy makers). We use pyrolysis as a benchmark to point out the barriers to adoption. The hierarchical analysis process (AHP) method was applied to identify the most significant barriers to the adoption of gasification. Twenty-seven barriers were identified and prioritized in two dimensions and five categories “technical”, “economic and financial”, “socio-cultural and organizational”, “political, governmental and institutional”, and “ecological and geographical” barriers. The category of socio-cultural and organizational barriers emerged as the most critical in the adoption of gasification. This category deserves special consideration to go past the pilot installation stage and adopting this technology.