Setting a baseline for Integrated Landscape Design: Cost and risk assessment in herbaceous feedstock supply chains

Abstract

The literature on bioenergy has pointed out that financial risks and limited performance benchmarks are leading barriers to wide-spread industry expansion. The purpose of this paper is to document a baseline cost and risk assessment from the perspective of biorefinery management for two herbaceous feedstocks, switchgrass and corn stover, in an application of Integrated Landscape Design (ILD). Integrating energy crops into row crops has attracted considerable attention leading to a variety of ways to implement ILD. However, variation in production conditions, different methods of implementing unit operations, and technology performance variability are among many factors leading to financial risk facing biorefineries from feedstock supply based on ILD. Utilizing data from field-based trials on switchgrass and corn stover in Virginia and Iowa in the United States, we estimate feedstock logistics cost and characterize it by a distribution of potential outcomes. The results show that, across fields included in the study, logistics cost for switchgrass vary from $73 per Mg to $171 per Mg. For corn stover, the inter-field variation in cost ranges from $83 per Mg to $105 per Mg. Results for intra-field uncertainty show that the cost for switchgrass ranges from $58 per Mg to $74 per Mg, and for corn stover they range from $50 per Mg to $65 per Mg. These results inform a baseline from which improvements in ILD can be compared, and provide biorefinery management with a starting point for cost and risk estimates of feedstock from ILD.