Abstract
Bioenergy is one of effective measures to decrease GHG emission, because of its carbon neutrality. However, high costs for transportation, feedstock, and energy conversion are a barrier to promote the utilization of bioenergy. There is an economical trade-off relation between a scale effect of plant capacity and transporting distance of fuel supply, because most biomass resources are widely distributed throughout a region. Both transportation and process conversion costs can be reduced by developing an efficient bioenergy production system. Biomass is a local energy which has various types of resources. Its installed potential should be evaluated in a specific area. This study aims at developing an optimal method to analyze minimum cost of transportation and process conversion system utilized in Ibaraki prefecture. An optimal plant size and a location of bioenergy conversion plant are determined by minimizing transportation cost (p-median problem) with exogenous value of the number of plants. Cost, benefit and CO2 emission reduction are estimated by the optimization model and the geographic information system. From the model analysis we can obtain an optimal transportation process and the number of profitable conversion plants for each biomass resource in Ibaraki prefecture.
