The Impact of Combined Torrefaction and Pelletization Process on Forestry Biomass Supply in California

The purpose of this study is to investigate combined torrefaction and pelletization as a pretreatment process to improve the biomass feedstock supply efficiency for bioenergy production given the energy and transportation infrastructure in California. Scale-dependent techno-economic assessment of biomass torrefaction and pelletization process from existing literature was combined with biomass transportation cost evaluations derived from a spatial-explicit network analysis to construct a mixed-integer linear program for finding the most economical biomass feedstock supply system configuration. In addition, the authors assessed the sensitivity of the optimal system to variations of key system variables including the operational scale of pretreatment facilities, road and rail transportation cost, feedstock procurement cost and biorefinery-gate cost saving of torrefied pellet utilization. The results indicated that incorporation of torrefaction and pelletization can reduce the average transportation cost and average total delivered costs by 16.7% ($0.84/GJ) and 7.7% ($0.42/GJ) respectively compared to the optimal system without pretreatment.

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• Supplemental Notes:
  • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ADC80 Alternative Transportation Fuels and Technologies.
• Corporate Authors:

  Transportation Research Board

  500 Fifth Street, NW
  Washington, DC  United States  20001
• Authors:
  • Li, Yuanzhe
  • Tittmann, Peter
  • Parker, Nathan
  • Jenkins, Bryan
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 94th Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC, United States
  • Date: 2015-1-11 to 2015-1-15
• Date: 2015

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Features: Figures; References; Tables;
• Pagination: 24p
• Monograph Title: TRB 94th Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Biomass; Biomass fuels; Costs; Economic impacts; Literature reviews; Mixed integer programming; Optimization; Sensitivity analysis; Supply chain management
• Geographic Terms: California
• Subject Areas: Economics; Energy; Highways; I10: Economics and Administration;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01554315
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 15-5220
• Files: PRP, TRIS, TRB, ATRI
• Created Date: Feb 26 2015 9:49AM