APPROACHES FOR MODELLING THE INTERNATIONAL TRADE OF BIOMASS FOR BIOENERGY (TO EVALUATE ITS IMPACTS ON BIOENERGY MARKETS)

ABSTRACT: Since biomass is of utmost importance for the future energy supply there will be an increase in the global and regional trade of biomass. The understanding of how this development is best organised and managed is still relatively poor. As a result there is the need for models to improve the understanding of biomass and bioenergy markets and its linkage to other sectors of the economy and to analyse the impacts of biomass utilisation and trade. Therefore we carried out a literature survey on three different types of modelling approaches (basic modelling approaches for analysing macroeconomic effects of international trade, computable general equilibrium models and geographic information system (GIS) approaches) and analysed their ability to deal with biomass trade. All of these approaches have strong and weak points and consequently the suitable approach depends on the particular research question and objective of the analysis. Up to now no customized models are available for incorporating global import/export potentials and international trade. A combination of GIS technology, basic transport modelling approaches and conventional energy modelling methods could be a reasonable approach for the modelling of bioenergy systems