| Abstract |
In the growing concerns towards global environmental qualities and sustainable feedstocks supplies, scientific and technological efforts were intensified to utilize alternative renewable resources. In... this regard, biomass appeared to be one of the potential feedstocks because it is generally carbon neutral and essentially renewable. Furthermore, biomass is virtually found in every part of the world in abundance and could provide socio-economic benefits. However, if it is not managed properly, biomass will be less competitive due to several issues that are associated with its supply chain. Typical biomass supply chain has a series of activities such as growing, harvesting, transporting, aggregating, and conversion which systematic and efficient flows of materials from the fields to the users are highly important. Biomass has competing uses, different kinds and origins which are potentially exploitable, poor geographic distributions for retrieving and transporting, and variations in physical and chemical properties. It is difficult to make informed decision for any biomass utilization project without having an optimal supply chain. This presentation addresses these issues and presents models for the biomass supply chain for manufacturing energy, chemicals, and materials based on their respective processing routes. The aim is not only to focus on energy production from biomass but also to include chemicals and materials because of several factors such as an emerging cost competitive energy resource such as shale gas, highly volatile energy prices, and customer’s preparedness and acceptances. Furthermore, it also could leverage biomass plantations on the producers’ sides. The models consider annual profitability of producing products as the performance indicator. Profitability was based on revenues of selling the products and takes costs into consideration as well (e.g. biomass cost, transportation cost, production cost, and emission treatment costs). All processing options are presented in a superstructure of alternatives over which an optimal search was conducted to yield the optimal utilization of biomass for producing materials and energy, while a single ownership was assumed for the whole supply chain’s facilities.show more
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