A composite-curve-based biomass procurement planning approach

The production of fuels and chemicals from biomass has received considerable attention recently due to environmental concerns¹. Since the production of biofuels involves relatively expensive feedstock and energy-intensive biomass transportation, any biomass-to-fuels strategy should include an efficient, both in terms of cost and environmental impact, biomass (feedstock) supply chain. Unlike fossil fuels, biomass, as a low-energy density resource, is sparsely distributed. The efficient biomass transportation thus requires biomass procurement planning methods². In many studies, the farms are treated as points without shape or area³. This is a reasonable assumption when the transportation distance is so large that the shape and size of the farms can be neglected. In this case, the transportation problem is modeled as a point-to-point (farm-to-refinery) problem. However, the shape and size of the farms cannot be neglected when the refinery is close to the farm, which means that the size of the farm is not significantly smaller than the transportation distances, which in turn means that the error in approximating the real transportation distance with the distance between the center of the farm and the bio-refinery can be quite large. In this case, transportation should be treated as a region-to-point problem. To this end, we discuss a novel approach to biomass procurement planning on a region-to-point basis.