Techno-Economic and Environmental Assessment of Power Supply Chain by Using Waste Biomass Gasification in Iceland

Abstract

In this paper, technical, economic and environmental assessments are carried out for power supply chain by using timber and wood waste (T&WW) gasification in Iceland. The Icelandic municipalities were clustered into 35 subgroups based on various number of households/ inhabitants. Different expenses were taken into consideration, like capital, installation engineering, operation and maintenance costs and the interest rate of the investment. Regarding revenues, they come from the electricity sale and the fee paid by the Icelandic municipalities for waste collection and disposal. The economic feasibility was conducted based on the economic indicators of net present value (NPV) and discounted payback period (DPP), bringing together three different scenarios, with interest rates of 8% for Scenario 1, 10% for Scenario 2 and 13% for Scenario 3. The environmental analysis was also performed relied on the environmental impacts of global warming (GWP), acidification (AP) and eutrophication (EP) potentials. The results show that changing the interest rate does not have significant impact on NPV and DPP for all studied scenarios. NPV is positive for the municipalities with more than 150 inhabitants or for a gasification plant with the capability to generate greater than 45 kW. Moreover, electricity generation based on T&WW gasification would lead to a GWP of 13 tonCO2eq (Subgroup 1) to 469 tonCO2eq (Subgroup 35), AP of 173.6 tonSO2eq (Subgroup 1) to 6187.2 tonSO2eq (Subgroup 35) and EP potential of 331.9 tonNO3eq (Subgroup 1) to 11,827.7 tonNO3eq (Subgroup 35), yearly.