Scaling-up a resource efficient economy: embedding biorefineries in the industry of the future through agile supply chains

During recent years the design of industry supply chain has experimented significant changes through the establishment of collaborative networks. Nowadays, there is a strong necessity for reducing costs and offering the maximum agility in terms of product availability and rapid respond in front of unanticipated changes, facts that are being achieved by implementing decentralized supply chain structures. Making reference to the article field of study, the biorefineries supply chain, some of their inefficiencies may be solved by adapting them to decentralised superstructures. Nevertheless, regarding the chemical and energy industry, these new guidelines in supply chain design are not yet full established due to the complications that may appear in terms of storage and transportation of intermediate products. There is a large amount of literature working on the objective to manage uncertainty in the biomass supply chain (Yue et al., 2014). As a concise summary, the main problems to face along the biomass supply chain consist on feedstock uncertainty, quality variability, demand variability, time dependence, storage, transportation and flexibility (Miret et al., 2016). The aim of this document is to evaluate different feasible decentralized supply chain scenarios for the particular case of biorefineries, focusing on bio-ethanol production. The new scenarios are defined to struggle against the mentioned problems and provide more agility to the biomass supply chain. The article will continue by introducing the current biorefinery concept, in order to define a starting point for the development of new scenarios. Next, a research on the state of the art of decentralised biorefineries will be presented. Right after, the KPIs selected to evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of the different scenarios will be introduced. Finally, a discussion of each scenario will be conducted for taking out the conclusions