Analysis of Economic, Environmental and Societal Benefits of The Use of Biomass as Manufacturing Feedstocks

Abstract

Abstract
A key importance in utilizing biomass as manufacturing feedstocks is their ability to produce a wide range of useful products to society that include energy, chemicals, materials, foods, and feeds from inexpensive and easily available resources. This fact has distinguished biomass’s advantages as compared to other renewable resources (i.e. wind, solar, geothermal, etc.) in which their main uses are to produce energy. With all of the potentials and possibilities to diverse product generations, concerns are directed to select the optimal production pathway out of all the feasible generating options within the boundary of the problem. In this study, the objective was to develop an optimization model in order to quantify economic, societal, and environmental benefits of using biomass feedstocks to produce a range of products such as pellet, steam, bio-syngas, bio-hydrogen, bio-char, bio-diesel and bio-oil. The optimization model has been formulated by taking miscanthus, switchgrass and forage sorghum as biomass feedstocks. A superstructure of alternatives was constructed to show possible product generations in a series of biomass processing stages. In each of the processing stages, flows of materials capture the interconnections between feedstocks, technologies and produced products. The total expected profit in $ per year, the product’s yield, selling price, employment credit, and carbon credit were used as measures of economic, societal and environmental benefits. The application of the methodology to a case study has shown that the expected annual profit can reach $ 800,000 per year.

Keywords: Biomass Utilizations and Benefits, Linear Programming, Optimization, Superstructure Optimization, Miscanthus, Switchgrass, and Forage Sorghum.