Transportation and Site Location Analysis for Regional Integrated Biomass Assessment (RIBA)

The farmgate cost and available supply of biomass often exhibit considerable variation within a State. This variation, combined with the relatively high cost of transporting bulky biomass material, produces a wide range of expected delivered feedstock costs across a State. As a consequence, both production and transportation costs must be well-modeled when analyzing potential locations for conversion facilities. The Regional Integrated Biomass Assessment system consists of two phases. The descriptive phase characterizes a farmgate cost and supply surface for switchgrass production over a given State. These results are passed to the analytical phase, where a transportation model is used to compute the marginal cost of supplying an ethanol plant at a prescribed level of demand. The model generates a marginal cost surface that illustrates the most promising areas for locating an ethanol plant. Next, a sequential location model simulates the commercial development of ethanol production facilities. This model considers every road network node as a potential site and generates a sequence of likely plant locations. Results from the RIBA analysis demonstrate that the cost of switchgrass can increase dramatically from one location to another. This variation will seriously effect the economics of conversion in the proper sizing and locating of ethanol plant facilities