Design of a sustainable woody biomass supply chain considering facility location problem

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to design a sustainable supply chain of wood biomass fuel by applying a mixed integer programming (MIP: Mixed Integer Programming). To evaluate the effect of routing choice quantitatively, two objective functions are defined; cost minimization and energy consumption minimization. In the Railway case, 4 t truck can be used to transport wood logs and pellets, and railway can be used to transport pellets. In the Heavy truck case, three types of trucks (4 t, 10 t, 20 t) can be used to transport wood logs and pellets. As a case study area, five prefectures of Japan's Tohoku region are selected. The computational result provides that supply cost becomes 17,058 - 24,773 JPY/t_pellet. In any case, since cost of pellet supply is lower than distribution price of pellet which is 45,000 JPY/t_pellet in Japan, letting break-even point to distribution price of domestic pellet, this system has competitiveness to Japanese pellet suppliers. Effective utilization rates of biomass resource through supply chain show 0.802 - 0.834 that is higher than the previous study using waste woods. The CO₂ reduction by coal substitution shows 0.967-1.029×10⁶ t-CO₂/year which shares 65 - 69 % of CO₂ emission from the coal combustion.