Optimal localisation of next generation biofuel production in Sweden – Part II

About the project

Sweden with its rich forest resources is of significant interest concerning future large-scale production of next generation biofuels. Large plant sizes, however, increase the required feedstock supply area and put significant demands on the supply chain. Co-location with
other industry provides an opportunity for higher system efficiencies, but also puts additional requirements on the locations, as does competition for the available feedstock. Since production facilities for next generation biofuels are associated with very large investments,
careful evaluation of possible plant locations is of utmost importance.

Through the f3 project Optimal Localisation of next generation biofuel production in Sweden, a techno-economic, geographically explicit biofuel production plant localisation model was developed. The model, named BeWhere Sweden, is a potentially valuable tool for simulation and analysis of the Swedish energy system, including the industry and transport sectors. It minimises the cost of the entire studied system, including costs and revenues for biomass harvest and transportation, production plants, transportation and delivery of biofuels, sales of co-products, and economic policy instruments. The model will thus choose the least costly pathways from one set of feedstock supply points to a specific biofuel production plant and further to a set of biofuel demand points, while meeting the demand for biomass in other sectors. Focus is on forest-based biomass and integration with industry, in particular with forest industry.

In this work BeWhere Sweden has been used to model four different roadmap scenarios for 2030 that are based on scenarios presented by the Swedish Environment Protection Agency in their report “Basis for a roadmap for Sweden without GHG emissions in 2050”. The roadmap
scenarios used here take into account e.g. demand for transport, transport fuel and next generation biofuels, available forest biomass resources, biomass available for industrial purposes, biomass usage in other energy and industrial sectors, and energy market conditions.
The primary objective has been to identify cost-effective types of biofuel production plant locations that are robust to various boundary conditions, in particular regarding energy market prices, policy instruments, investment costs, feedstock competition and integration possibilities with existing energy systems, and to provide a broader analysis of the model results regarding e.g. implications for policy makers and connections between different actors in the biofuel innovation system.