Abstract
Operational and economic trade-offs in the design of second-generation biomass (SGB) supply chains guide the decisions about plant scale and location as well as biomass collection routes. This paper compares different SGB supply chain designs with a focus on mobile pyrolysis plants and centralized versus decentralized collection of biomass in terms of economic and environmental sustainability. Pyrolysis scenarios are also compared to fuel-upgrading and electricity production scenarios.The empirical context of this paper is based on a scenario analysis for processing lignocellulosic biomass, particularly landscape wood, reed and roadside grass available in the Overijssel region (Eastern Netherlands). Four scenarios are compared: (1) mobile pyrolysis plant processes the locally available biomass on-site into pyrolysis oil which is sent to a regional biofuel production unit for upgrading to marketable biofuel; (2) local biomass is collected and transported to a regional pyrolysis-based biofuel production unit for upgrading to a marketable biofuel; (3) mobile pyrolysis plant performs the on-site conversion to pyrolysis oil which is transported to an oil refinery outside the region (Rotterdam); and (4) collected biomass is sent to the nearest electricity production unit to generate electricity.The results show that processing SGB is costly and upgraded oil and refined oil are at least 65% more expensive compared to their fossil counterparts. In terms of economic and environmental performance, the mobile plant performs slightly better than a fixed plant. The energy output/input ratio range is between 6.99 and 7.54 and CO2 emissions range is between 96 and 138 kg CO2/t upgraded oil.
Highlights
In the last decade, the bioenergy markets have been evolving and a policy shift towards second generation biomass (SGB) has been observed in developed countries
The European Union (EU)'s recent bioenergy legislation imposes the reduction of the share of food-based bioenergy in the renewable energy sector from 10% to 5% to reduce the adverse impacts of biofuels on climate and land use change
For S0, we have an additional decision: send the biomass to which electricity generation units (EGUs)? we introduce a decision variable fbik to indicate the fraction of processed biomass type b in municipality i that is assigned to EGU k
Summary
The bioenergy markets have been evolving and a policy shift towards second generation biomass (SGB) has been observed in developed countries. As in many primary resource cases, SGB faces competition from several production pathways resulting in different outputs such as biofuel, electricity, and heat. The production of these outputs results in different economic and environmental performance depending on several spatial (e.g., dispersion of biomass locations), logistical (e.g., centralized or decentralized collection), operational (e.g., on-site or fixed-location processing), and technological variables (e.g., availability of multi-processing pathways) [23,24]. This paper firstly aims at comparing the economic and environmental performance of the production of pyrolysis-based biofuels and electricity via different production pathways at a regional level by analysing the trade-off impacts of these variables in a case study. The empirical context of this case study is based on the processing of SGB, namely reed, roadside grass, and landscape
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