Optimal Location of Biogas Plants in Supply Chains under Carbon Effects: Insight from a Case Study on Animal Manure in North Dakota

Yong Shin Park,Joseph Szmerekovsky,Alan Dybing

doi:10.1155/2019/5978753

Yong Shin Park, Joseph Szmerekovsky + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1155/2019/5978753

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Abstract

Faced with increasing concerns over the negative environmental impact due to human and industrial activities, biomass industry practitioners and policy makers have great interest in green supply chains to reduce carbon emissions from supply chain activities. There are many studies which model the biomass supply chain and its environmental impact. However, animal waste sourced biogas supply chain has not received much attention in the literature. Biogas from animal manure not only provides energy efficiency, but also minimizes carbon emissions compared to existing biomass products. Therefore, this study proposes a mixed integer linear program that minimizes total supply costs and carbon emissions from an animal waste sourced biogas supply chain while it also incorporates carbon price in the model to see the impact of a carbon policy on tactical and strategic supply chain decisions. To validate the model proposed, a case study of North Dakota is adopted where there is a high potential for a biogas plant to be developed. The results of our optimization experiment indicate that supply chain performance in terms of both costs and emissions is very sensitive to a carbon pricing mechanism.

Highlights

Biomethane is formed in nature by the biological degradation of biodegradable organic material such as biowaste, sludge, manure, and agroresidues under anaerobic conditions
We address the problem of facility location in biogas supply chain that use animal manure from dairy farms, simultaneously deciding the optimal capacity of the plant at each location and the amount of animal manure to be transported from the daily farms to the biogas plant and the amount of carbon emissions from the biogas supply chain including acquisition, transportation, and production
We observe the number of total anaerobic digestions (ADs) opened and their size and amount of biogas produced for each optimization scenario

Summary

Introduction

Biomethane is formed in nature by the biological degradation of biodegradable organic material such as biowaste, sludge, manure, and agroresidues under anaerobic conditions. Motivated by the evolving regulatory climate change pressures in the United States, this paper develops an optimization model and consider the strategic decisions of the number and location of biogas plants, as well as the tactical optimization of its capacity and the biogas production in order to explore how the bioenergy industry can manage its supply chain under the two carbon regulatory schemes, including carbon pricing and carbon trading mechanisms, which are two popular environmental regulatory policy schemes that have been widely implemented in different nations [9, 10]. A new approach in the biogas supply chain system is required to face ever-changing energy markets because uncertainties in climate change calculation continue to pose some of the most challenging aspects in designing sustainable bioenergy supply chains [11] In this regard, Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) is an effective optimization tool, which captures the impact of different scenarios of emission price and caps on the biogas supply chain and provides optimal strategies in designing and planning for practitioners and policy makers.

Carbon Regulation in the US and Biomass Supply Chain

Problem Statement and Mathematical Model

A Case Study

Results and Discussion

Summary and Conclusion