SIZE OPTIMIZATION OF A BIOMASS TO LIQUID FUEL CONVERSION FACILITY WITHIN A BIOMASS SUPPLY CHAIN

Bioenergy and biobased products offer new opportunities for strengthening rural economies, enhancing environmental health, and providing a secure energy future. Realizing these benefits will require the development of many different biobased products and biobased production systems. The biomass feedstocks that will enable such development must be sustainable, widely available across many different regions, and compatible with industry requirements. The purpose of this research is to develop an economic model that will help decision makers identify the optimal size of a forest resource based biofuel production facility. The model must be applicable to decision makers anywhere, though the modeled case analysis will focus on a specific region; the Upper Peninsula (U.P.) of Michigan. This work will illustrate that several factors influence the optimal facility size. Further, this effort will reveal that the location of the facility does affect size. The results of the research show that an optimal facility size can be determined for a given location and are based on variables including forest biomass availability, transportation cost rate, and economy of scale factors. These variables acting alone and interacting together can influence the optimal size and the decision of where to locate the biofuel production facility. Further, adjustments to model variables like biomass resource and storage costs have no effect on facility size, but do affect the unit cost of the biofuel produced.

A STUDY ON REGIONAL CIRCULAR ECONOMY SYSTEM AND ITS CONSTRUCTION, OPERATION AND SUGGESTION FOR SHANGHAI

The characteristics of the traditional linear economic model are high consumption, high emission and low efficiency. Economic development is still largely at the expense of the environment and requires a natural resource investment. This can realize rapid economic development but resource depletion and environmental pollution become increasingly serious. In the 1990's a new economic model, circular economics, began to enter our vision. The circular economy maximizes production and minimizes the impact of economic activities on the ecological environment through organizing the activities through the closed-loop feedback cycle of "resources - production - renewable resource". Circular economy is a better way to solve the contradictions between the economic development and resource shortages. Developing circular economy has become the major strategic initiatives to achieving sustainable development in countries all over the world. The evaluation of the development of circular economics is a necessary step for regional circular economy development. Having a quantitative evaluation of circular economy can better monitor and reveal the contradictions and problems in the process of the development of recycling economy. This thesis will: 1) Create an evaluation model framework and new types of industries and 2) Make an evaluation of the Shanghai circular economy currently to analyze the situation of Shanghai in the development of circular economy. I will then propose suggestions about the structure and development of Shanghai circular economy.

Development of an optimization model for biofuel facility size and location and a simulation model for design of a biofuel supply chain

To mitigate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and reduce U.S. dependence on imported oil, the United States (U.S.) is pursuing several options to create biofuels from renewable woody biomass (hereafter referred to as “biomass”). Because of the distributed nature of biomass feedstock, the cost and complexity of biomass recovery operations has significant challenges that hinder increased biomass utilization for energy production. To facilitate the exploration of a wide variety of conditions that promise profitable biomass utilization and tapping unused forest residues, it is proposed to develop biofuel supply chain models based on optimization and simulation approaches. The biofuel supply chain is structured around four components: biofuel facility locations and sizes, biomass harvesting/forwarding, transportation, and storage. A Geographic Information System (GIS) based approach is proposed as a first step for selecting potential facility locations for biofuel production from forest biomass based on a set of evaluation criteria, such as accessibility to biomass, railway/road transportation network, water body and workforce. The development of optimization and simulation models is also proposed. The results of the models will be used to determine (1) the number, location, and size of the biofuel facilities, and (2) the amounts of biomass to be transported between the harvesting areas and the biofuel facilities over a 20-year timeframe. The multi-criteria objective is to minimize the weighted sum of the delivered feedstock cost, energy consumption, and GHG emissions simultaneously. Finally, a series of sensitivity analyses will be conducted to identify the sensitivity of the decisions, such as the optimal site selected for the biofuel facility, to changes in influential parameters, such as biomass availability and transportation fuel price. Intellectual Merit The proposed research will facilitate the exploration of a wide variety of conditions that promise profitable biomass utilization in the renewable biofuel industry. The GIS-based facility location analysis considers a series of factors which have not been considered simultaneously in previous research. Location analysis is critical to the financial success of producing biofuel. The modeling of woody biomass supply chains using both optimization and simulation, combing with the GIS-based approach as a precursor, have not been done to date. The optimization and simulation models can help to ensure the economic and environmental viability and sustainability of the entire biofuel supply chain at both the strategic design level and the operational planning level. Broader Impacts The proposed models for biorefineries can be applied to other types of manufacturing or processing operations using biomass. This is because the biomass feedstock supply chain is similar, if not the same, for biorefineries, biomass fired or co-fired power plants, or torrefaction/pelletization operations. Additionally, the research results of this research will continue to be disseminated internationally through publications in journals, such as Biomass and Bioenergy, and Renewable Energy, and presentations at conferences, such as the 2011 Industrial Engineering Research Conference. For example, part of the research work related to biofuel facility identification has been published: Zhang, Johnson and Sutherland [2011] (see Appendix A). There will also be opportunities for the Michigan Tech campus community to learn about the research through the Sustainable Future Institute.