Abstract
In planning biomass-based power generation, planners should take into account the different stakeholders along the biomass supply chains, i.e. biomass resources suppliers, transportation, conversion and electricity suppliers etc. The different participants have different concerns and priorities about environmental, social and economical sides of establishing the biomass energy systems, e.g. electricity production from forestry residues. To help the planners fulfill such concerns a study that addresses the different possible scenarios of biomass supply chains and estimating their impacts is needed. Up to our best knowledge, no study has been reported that takes into consideration the different factors affecting the planning process of biomass supply chain systems for the Japanese case. In this context, our study has been developed as a first step toward integrating the planning parameters and their estimation in a single entity. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for estimating cost, CO2 emissions and labors of possible forestry residues supply-chains scenarios. We call our new framework a Cost-Emission-Labor Model (CELM). The proposed CELM approach provides the biomass planners as well as stakeholders with an integrated simulation tool helping them in their decision-making process. A sensitivity analysis was made, based on a given case study, for the proposed CELM. It is found sensitive to efficiency and capacity of the conversion plant when calculating the cost. While for emission calculations, the CELM is also influenced much by conversion plant efficiency, bulk density and CH4 emissions from storage.
