(4l) Sustainable Biomass Feedstock Production for Bioenergy: Is It Possible and How Will It Happen?

An efficient and sustainable biomass feedstock production system is critical for the success of the burgeoning biorefinery industry. There are two major challenges in our path towards achieving this goal. First, the techno-economic feasibility of biomass production and provision must be evaluated. The existing technological barriers, beneficial management strategies and optimal operating practices must be identified in the context of economic and environmental criteria. Second, implementation of these optimal practices in real world must be encouraged and ensured. This includes understanding the development of the biomass market in the presence of multiple stakeholders that must participate and yet compete for a fraction of the profit. This work will showcase research conducted towards achieving both these objectives. BioFeed is an optimization model that optimizes the design and management level decisions for feedstock production and provision. It has been used here to evaluate the techno-economic feasibility of Miscanthus and Energy cane as feedstock. Results for Miscanthus show that throughput capacities of various pre-processing options are the bottlenecks. Moreover, centralized processing facilities shared by farms are beneficial to ensure a uniform biomass form and quality at the refinery gate. In order to study the biomass market development, this work develops an agent-based simulation model. Each class of stakeholder within the system, such as farmers, refinery, transport companies, storage elevators, farm consultants and equipment renters, are modeled as a set of agents. The behavior and decision making of each class of agents is modeled with a set of rules, which are based not only on the economic rationale such as profit maximization, but also on unique mental models and cognitive processes such as risk aversion. The role of the government, assumed to be very important to stimulate growth in this field, is also modeled in the form of policies. The model will be used to carry out simulation studies over multiple years to predict different possible development paths for the biomass feedstock market.