The IEA Bioenergy report was released in the context of the project 'Assessment of successes and lessons learned for the deployment of biofuels'.
Cost-effective, reliable and sustainable feedstock supply chains are crucial for the successful development of advanced biofuels. Advanced biofuels will develop in an increasingly internationalized market in terms of tradable raw materials and in international end-use markets such as shipping and aviation.
This work package evaluated case studies for raw material supply chains from multiple perspectives, highlighting lessons from biorefineries and pulp mills using short rotation wood fiber crops (Brazil), European experiences in developing bio-based supply chains for torrefied woody biomass, pioneering biorefineries in the US (traditional pre-processing of raw materials for herbaceous raw materials) and conceptual depots producing conversion-ready raw materials and by-products. The focus was on the supply chains of biomass feedstocks, including all logistics operations to move biomass from the source of supply, for example field or forest, to the biorefinery.
Key lessons:
- Facilitating the shift and scale-up of (advanced) biofuels from road transport to the aviation and maritime sectors will remain a challenge, despite technical innovations and economies of scale that can lead to significant cost savings.
- Harvesting and processing biomass can be accomplished with a wide range of equipment and collection systems. Adapted foraging machines and/or chopping in the field can offer an effective alternative for different raw material systems.
- Because there is a time gap between harvest and use of biomaterials, issues arise regarding degradation, loss of raw materials and inconsistencies in quality, which in turn negatively impact yield and throughput in the biorefinery. Approaches such as field preprocessing, alternative storage designs and the use of feedstock blending can help overcome some of the challenges faced by pioneering biorefineries.
- The consistency of raw material quality is an important consideration in the development of reliable raw material pre-processing systems. Some problems can be addressed through preprocessing steps such as torrefaction.
- The processing of raw raw materials into water-resistant solid or liquid bioenergy carriers naturally has a major influence on the design of the transport chains. Enabling the use of existing infrastructure, such as the coal chain, reduces investment needs, increases transport efficiency and further reduces specific costs.
- If biomass is shipped in large units along the main shipping routes, the specific costs (energy-based) are moderate. But once outside these main routes and especially when only smaller quantities are transported, the share of transport costs in the total product costs is very significant. This situation penalizes resources in remote areas and even locks out some of the potentially valuable resources from biofuel markets.
- The development of sustainability certification schemes and their benchmarking are important. Necessitating transparency and verification of the audit process by qualified professionals to ensure the quality and robustness of a certification system is critical.
- The carbon intensity of fuels, including biofuels, is becoming an increasingly relevant metric in the transport sector's greenhouse gas reduction policy. Supply chain greenhouse gas emissions calculations at the raw material level can be used to demonstrate compliance with sustainability criteria or to compare the greenhouse gas performance of different pathways. Other sustainability impacts and important trade-offs, for example between climate and other impacts such as water use, biodiversity and socio-economic impacts, are also essential to consider. Key lessons learned from the challenges and controversies surrounding conventional biofuels (e.g. ILUC), electricity and heat (e.g. biogenic carbon issues), assessment tools and efforts to secure sustainable production are therefore relevant to facilitate the sustainable deployment of advanced biofuels.
This report was delivered in the context of the project 'Assessment of successes and lessons learned for the use of biofuels', work package 4.
The full set of reports is available here.
Source: ieabioenery.com
