Abstract
Bioenergy supply chains can offer social benefits. In most related research, the total number of created jobs is used as the indicator of social benefits. Only a few of them quantify social benefits considering the different impact of economic activities in different locations. In this paper, a new method of measuring the social benefits of bioethanol supply chains is proposed that considers job creation, biomass purchase, and the different impacts of economic activities in different locations. A multi-objective mixed integer linear programming (MILP) model is developed to address the optimal design of a bioethanol supply chain that maximizes both economic and social benefits. The ε-constraint method is employed to solve the model and a set of Pareto-optimal solutions is obtained that shows the relationship between the two objectives. The developed model is applied to case studies in Liaoning Province in Northeast China. Actual data are collected as practical as possible for the feasibility and effectiveness of the results. The results show that the bioethanol supply chain can bring about both economic and social benefits in the given area and offers governments a better and more efficient way to create social benefits. The effect of the government subsidy on enterprises’ decisions about economic and social benefits is discussed.
Highlights
With the high-speed of economic growth, China is facing a situation of energy shortage
Kim et al [21] developed a mixed integer linear programming (MILP) to maximize the overall profit of the bioenergy supply chain, which enabled the selection of fuel conversion technologies, capacities, biomass locations, and the logistics of transportation
(26), in the optimal solution, three small-scale biorefineries are to be constructed, in Anshan, Jinzhou, Two biorefineries and their biomass suppliers can be seen in Figure 5a, and the customers supplied by the biorefineries can be seen in Figure 5b, where the region in the third color is the bioethanol supplied by both biorefineries simultaneously
Summary
With the high-speed of economic growth, China is facing a situation of energy shortage. As for social benefits, it is planned that the development of the bioenergy industry by 2020 will provide four million jobs and increase farmers’ income by the billion U.S dollars every year [5]. Some research considered the different impacts of new jobs based on their location [7], in which the social benefits were calculated as the weighted sum of the newly created job and the weights were location-dependent In this paper, both the extended scope and the impact factors based on locations are considered. The social benefits are calculated as the weighted sum of job creation and biomass purchase, where the weights are assigned to regions according to their per capita incomes.
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